dylint VS infer

There is also https://github.com/trailofbits/dylint for writing custom lints.

Apart from clippy (which uses rustc-internal APIs), there are two other projects which can be used to implement lints: rust-analyzer can be extended with more diagnostics, and dylint provides an interface to run custom lints for Rust.

RE: Program is a model

There are some more advanced refactoring tools now available. These tools enable you to write code to detect bad code patterns and even automatically fix them. You can use them to write one-off transformations of code too. Rust has Dylint [1] and C# has Roslyn Analyzers [2]. Facebook has tooling [3] that helps writing CodeMods, enabling authors to generate changes for thousands of files at a time.

The thing I really would like to see is a smarter CI system. Caching of build outputs, so you don't have to rebuild the world from scratch every time. Distributed execution of tests and compilation, so you are not bottle-necked by one machine. Something that keeps track of which tests are flaky and which are broken on master, so you don't have to diagnose spurious build failures. Something that only runs the test that transitively depend on the code you change. Automatic bisecting of errors to the offending commit.

[1] https://github.com/trailofbits/dylint

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/code-quality/roslyn-...

[3] one example: https://github.com/facebook/jscodeshift

If you're looking for something like clippy but with custom lints, there's also dylint -- it is clippy, but with support for running dynamically loaded lints across multiple versions of Rust.

You might find dylint useful! It's exactly that: a tool to run custom clippy lints.

Dylint. A tool for running Rust lints from dynamic libraries.

I think most development occurs on problems that can't be formally modeled anyway. Most developers work on things like, "can you add this feature to the e-commerce site? And can the pop-up be blue?" which isn't really model-able.

But that's not to say that formal methods are useless! We can still prove some interesting aspects of programs -- for example, that every lock that gets acquired later gets released. I think tools like Infer[0] could become common in the coming years.

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

Using infer, someone else exploited null-dereference checks to introduce simple affine types in C++. Cppcheck also checks for null-dereferences. Unfortunately, that approach means that borrow-counting references have a larger sizeof than non-borrow counting references, so optimizing the count away potentially changes the semantics of a program which introduces a whole new way of writing subtly wrong code.

Meta/Facebook are long time OCaml users, their logo is on the OCaml website. Their static analysis tool and its predecessor are both written in OCaml.

Then this idea that the US government will tell tech companies how to write secure software. Let's get this straight, the private sector, especially big tech is miles ahead of US government in this regard. Microsoft literally invented threat modelling and modern exploit mitigations. Facebook has the best appsec processes pretty much in the whole world, including their own cutting edge code analyzer. AWS uses formal verification everywhere. Meanwhile the US government itself runs mission-critical systems that's almost literally held together by bubble gum and toothpicks. Maybe they could dial down the arrogance a tad, get their own shit together, learn how this cyber stuff is actually done and only then try lecturing everyone else.

Efforts: Dependabot, CodeQL, Coverity, facebook's Infer tool, etc

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

"Move fast, break stuff" is a great approach when you aren't pushing the broken bits to production. Fuck, even Facebook, the big "move fast, break stuff" company, uses tools to detect errors in its continuous integration toolchain. https://fbinfer.com/

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.