Checkstyle VS NullAway

Compare Checkstyle vs NullAway and see what are their differences.

Checkstyle

Checkstyle is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. By default it supports the Google Java Style Guide and Sun Code Conventions, but is highly configurable. It can be invoked with an ANT task and a command line program. (by checkstyle)

NullAway

A tool to help eliminate NullPointerExceptions (NPEs) in your Java code with low build-time overhead (by uber)
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Checkstyle NullAway
15 20
8,121 3,524
0.7% 1.4%
9.9 9.0
7 days ago about 17 hours ago
Java Java
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Checkstyle

Posts with mentions or reviews of Checkstyle. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-08-25.

NullAway

Posts with mentions or reviews of NullAway. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-22.
  • My Thoughts on “Bad Code”
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2023
    Some patterns arise from language design

    * You can't express `T` where `null` is forbidden in the type system so you get NullPointerException everywhere and defensive null checks.

    * You express a sum type as a product type because your language does not have sum types .

    * Your language doesn't have first class multiple return values (or tuples) so you return extra parameters via out parameters or thread local variables such as `errno`.

    * Your language doesn't have exceptions (or algebraic effects) and can't do IO so you have monad transformers.

    * Your language doesn't have set-theoretic types so you need hacks like `thiserror` .

    * Your language doesn't have stackful coroutines or can't infer async IO for you so you have `async/await` spam or callback hell or "mono's".

    * Your language doesn't have exhaustive checks (or pattern matching) so you need a fallthrough case check on switch statements .

    * Your language doesn't have algebraic effects, so you need to pass context everywhere.

    I know someone will reply about Java's null annotation checking options, so here is one of them: https://github.com/uber/NullAway .

  • Will Project Valhalla bring Kotlin-like nulls to Java?
    1 project | /r/Kotlin | 9 Feb 2023
    If you must use Java, use Uber's Nullaway which gives null safety via Errorprone.
  • Retrofitting null-safety onto Java at Meta
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Nov 2022
    Does anyone have experience using this at Meta who can compare to https://github.com/uber/NullAway ?
  • How to use Java Records
    3 projects | dev.to | 18 Nov 2022
    A special kind of validation is enforcing that record fields are not null. (Un)fortunately, records do not have any special behavior regarding nullability. You can use tools like NullAway or Error Prone to prevent null in your code in general, or you can add checks to your records:
  • Backend Java 19 vs Kotlin?
    3 projects | /r/java | 31 Oct 2022
  • What does the future hold for Project Amber?
    3 projects | /r/java | 15 Sep 2022
    What do you think of https://github.com/uber/NullAway
  • Plans for Compile-time Null Pointer Safety?
    2 projects | /r/java | 16 Jul 2022
    Take a look at NullAway, a plugin for Error Prone.
  • Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Mar 2022
    PMD, Spotbugs, Nullaway: Java linting/static analysis (https://pmd.github.io, https://spotbugs.github.io, https://github.com/uber/NullAway)
  • Nullaway fully supports switch expressions without issues now in 0.9.5
    1 project | /r/java | 13 Jan 2022
  • What are some useful static analyzers for Java?
    9 projects | /r/java | 2 Jan 2022
    In personal projects, I've had good experiences using the error-prone compiler plugin with uber's nullaway.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Checkstyle and NullAway you can also consider the following projects:

spotless - Keep your code spotless

SonarQube - Continuous Inspection

Error Prone - Catch common Java mistakes as compile-time errors

Spotbugs - SpotBugs is FindBugs' successor. A tool for static analysis to look for bugs in Java code.

infer - A static analyzer for Java, C, C++, and Objective-C

PMD - An extensible multilanguage static code analyzer.

FindBugs - The new home of the FindBugs project

jQAssistant - Your Software. Your Structures. Your Rules.