Checkstyle VS infer

1. Conflicts between Spotless and Checkstyle Checkstyle is a tool for checking Java source code for compliance with code standards or a set of validation rules (best practices).

Never had anything like that though for four years my life revolved around getting PMD, checkstyle and Sonar rules to pass so my pull request would merge.

PMD, and checkstyle as well.

I’m a little out of date with Java, but I believe Checkstyle is currently popular: https://github.com/checkstyle/checkstyle

Another example can be applied to code quality itself. Most static analyzers are configurable. If you tried to set Checkstyle Google configuration to the mature project, you would probably get hundreds or even thousands of errors. You can start with just one rule. Ar first glance, it seems not so important. But after the moment when the configuration reaches the repository, you can be sure that no one else can violate this rule in the future.

Checkstyle: a tool that helps programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard: https://github.com/checkstyle/checkstyle

So I was there once, sharing my solution. For my current project I use the java formatter jar, but on my previous work I was using checkstyle, you can get it from here: Checkstyle. Then pass your checkstyle xml format config.

On the coding standards side, use linters like https://github.com/checkstyle/checkstyle and https://github.com/eslint/eslint so you have an automated way to detect some errors and enforce style standards.

sem-version java 11 wget https://github.com/checkstyle/checkstyle/releases/download/checkstyle-8.41/checkstyle-8.41-all.jar java -jar checkstyle-8.41-all.jar -c /sun_checks.xml MyFile.java

I notice there isn't fbinfer. It's pretty cool, and is used for this library.

TBH, there's a non-zero amount of non-"ivory tower" tools you may have used that are written in functional languages. Say, Pandoc or Shellcheck are written in Haskell; Infer and Flow are written in OCaml. RabbitMQ and Whatsapp are implemented in Erlang (FB Messenger was too, originally; they switched to the C++ servers later). Twitter backend is (or was, at least) written in Scala.

- borrow-cpp which exploits some null dereference checks in the infer static analyzer to model some of borrow checking.

> Maybe you could write tests as queries that would test a whole set of possible programs, not only the current version of your program at the moment.

I think that the future of programming is more sophisticated static analysis. Programmers will write statements like, "every code path that writes to the Payments database must have called validate_user()." Then, the tooling will confirm that rule with every commit.

We kind of have this already (for example, Facebook's Infer tool [0]), but I think it will become much more important in the coming decade.

0: https://github.com/facebook/infer

Great question! Formal methods groups in industry are growing rapidly and popping up in surprising places. Amazon's group is probably the most famous, but I think pretty much every big tech company has something going on in the formal verification / static analysis space. There's also a lot going on in blockchain . It's definitely becoming harder to hire people with FM skills, so in that sense, I think it's a great space to get into.

The downside is that the space is quite fragmented and a lot of tools have a high skill bar. If I was starting out, I'd probably focus on static analysis (eg. Infer or something similar - https://github.com/facebook/infer) because those tools tend to be easier to learn, and they have the potential to scale to really big systems. In contrast, Coq is a fine tool, but most people learn it by going to grad school which isn't useful short term career advice.

There are lot of great interviews with practitioners on the Galois podcast, Building Better Systems - that might be a good place to start exploring: https://www.stitcher.com/show/building-better-systems

> The only reliable way to have bug-free code is to prove it. It requires solid mathematical foundations and a programming language that allows formal proofs.

I'm going to be the "actually" guy and say that, actually, you can formally verify some studff about programs written in traditional/mainstream languages, like C. Matter of fact, this is a pretty lively research area, with some tools like CBMC [0] and Infer [1] also getting significant adoption in the industry.

[0]: https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc

[1]: https://fbinfer.com/

There are also static analyzers, for example PVS-Studio which is commercial and solid: https://pvs-studio.com/en/ The GCC compiler, starting with version 10, has a static analyzer that you activate with the “-fanalyzer” option. It’s still quite limited but I use it. Be sure the get GCC version 11.2 or later because the analyzer got much better after version 10. Facebook has a no-cost analyzer, but I haven’t tried it yet: https://fbinfer.com/