Hi everyone, Happy Thursday! Some time ago, Jacek raised the point that ant eclipse-warnings is generating too many false positives and not really working as expected. (CASSANDRA-18239)
Reminder: ant eclipse-warnings is a task we run with the goal to check Cassandra code - static analysis to warn on unsafe use of Autocloseable instances; checks against two related particular compiler options While trying to upgrade ECJ compiler that we use for this task (CASSANDRA-18190) so we can switch the task from running it with JDK8 to JDK11 in preparation for dropping JDK8, I hit the following issues: - the latest version of ECJ is throwing more than 300 Potential Resource Leak warnings. I looked at 10-15, and they were all false positives. - Even if we file a bug report to the Eclipse community, JDK11 is about to be removed with the next version of the compiler So I shared this information with Jacek. He came up with a different solution: It seems we already pull through Guava CheckerFramework with an MIT license, which appears to be acceptable according to this link - https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-a He already has an initial integration with Cassandra which shows the following: - CheckerFramework does not understand the @SuppressWarnings("resource") (there is a different one to be used), so it is immediately visible how it does not report all those false positives that eclipse-warnings does. On the flip side, I got the feedback that what it has witnessed so far is something we should investigate. - Also, there are additional annotations like @Owning that let you fix many problems at once because the tool understands that the ownership of the resources was passed to another entity; It also enables you to do something impossible with eclipse-warnings - you can tell the tool that there is another method that needs to be called to release the resources, like release, free, disconnect, etc. - the tool works with JDK8, JDK11, JDK17, and JDK20, so we can backport it even to older branches (while at the same time keeping eclipse-warnings there) - though it runs 8 minutes so, we should not run it with every test, some reorganization around ant tasks will be covered as even for eclipse-warnings it was weird to call it on every single test run locally by default If there are no concerns, we will continue replacing ant eclipse-warnings with the CheckerFramework as part of CASSANDRA-18239 and CASSANDRA-18190 in trunk. Best regards, Ekaterina
