Error Prone VS prusti-dev

error-prone is good for some extra static analysis.

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:

I am all in favour to more third side libraries adding functionalities, like Lombok, Manifold and error prone. As well as smaller projects like this shameless plug and what appears in this list

If only Google didn't suck when it came to Java9+ support... https://github.com/google/error-prone/issues/2649

I haven't used it. I use Google's ErrorProne + Lombok to prevent NPEs in java.

Take a look at NullAway, a plugin for Error Prone.

For some of this stuff, there are compiler extensions that allow extra type checking to be added e.g. Google Error-Prone: https://github.com/google/error-prone with stuff like: https://errorprone.info/bugpattern/ReturnMissingNullable.

Doesn't help you with third party libraries, but across an org applying that rule (and others!) typically ensures some consistency.

How to build a static analysis plugin. Google has a framework for Java with a good tutorial.

> The overall goal would be to figure out classical error conditions like nill pointers deference.

> If I can figure out if a pointer will be nil in some execution branch, there is no reason why a computer cannot do the same.

Note, this is called flow-sensitive typing (also called type narrowing) and I think that typescript does it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-sensitive_typing

> I personally would see this as an human race level upgrades. Imagine feeding your code to a CI that spit back something like: "you will have a panic at line 156 when your input is > 4"

A model checker can do that!

See this

https://model-checking.github.io/kani/tutorial-kinds-of-fail...

Other techniques are also possible

https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev#quick-example

(Here I could link a lot of things, I just selected two Rust projects to illustrate)

This works better if you are able to provide contracts in your API that says which guarantees you provide. Alternatively, asserts are useful too.

You might be interested in the Prusti project, which statically checks for absence of reachable panics, overflows etc. It also allows user-defined specifications such as pre and post-conditions, loop body invariants, termination checking and so on.

https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev

This is called refinement types and prusti might be the project you saw.

But there's also a lot of exciting work around formal verification like Prusti.

prusti

Efforts: seL4, Project Everest, the Prossimo project of the ISRG, Let's Encrypt, and Prusti for the Rust language

Wow that sounds really cool! I'm not an expert but does that mean that one day you could implement dependend types or refinement types in Rust as a crate ? I currently only know of tools like: Flux Creusot Kani Prusti