infer VS Spotbugs

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.

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.

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

PMD, Spotbugs, Nullaway: Java linting/static analysis (https://pmd.github.io, https://spotbugs.github.io, https://github.com/uber/NullAway)

While at it you could also point them to static code analyzers such as error_prone, spotbugs and pmd (use all 3 at once - they complement each other in detecting different issues).

First, it's better to use SpotBugs 4.4.1 and above, that includes a fix to make SARIF report compatible with Github code scanning API requirements.

If you don’t have checkmarx/Vera code money, have you looked at https://find-sec-bugs.github.io/? It can be used with a few things such as https://spotbugs.github.io/ and sonarQ

some good tools for general code analysis (Java): Sonarqube, PMD, SpotBugs

Static application security testing (SAST) is essential in tackling the source code vulnerabilities, late diagnosis of problems, and lack of root-cause analysis. This post describes how to carry out SAST in your Java application using SpotBugs.

SpotBugs