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This sounds so familiar. Some 6 years ago, I joined a team of engineers developing a large (1.5M LOC) classic java/spring/hibernate application for administrati

This sounds so familiar. Some 6 years ago, I joined a team of engineers developing a large (1.5M LOC) classic java/spring/hibernate application for administration in higher education. The software was buggy and loads of time was wasted on bug-fixing, so I introduced the Findbugs static analysis package. Result: >6000 (suspected) bugs. It took a couple of days of blunt perseverance of the whole team to clean up the mess and bring it back to normal proportions, but the result was a stable, well-functioning system. If you have static analysis tools available and you're writing a larger application (more than 10k LOC), and intend to maintain it for longer than a couple of months, it is definitely worth the initial investment. Better than static analysis, is static typing in a language with an expressive type-system, such as Scala. You simply cannot have NPEs with Option types. tldr; Used static analysis on 1.5M LOC codebase to reduce bugginess tremendously. Use of static analysis and statically typed languages is adviced.

blub 9y ago
The first time we ran static analysis on the C++ code base of a specific project, it found ~20 minor issues and a couple of medium severity ones which were mitigated by other checks. However, we also used 3rd-party open source C libraries, where it found thousands of problems. I'm talking about serious issues, memory leaks, invalid memory access, etc. P.S: I hope Scala implemented optional types better than Java, where the optional types themselves are nullable :)
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Optional types will eventually become value types on Java, you just need to wait until Java 10 for it.
- edejong 9y ago
  Well, technically you could write `val opt: Option[Int] = null`, but I've never seen it used and would seriously consider sending the author back to a course Scala for Dummies. It's interesting how many bugs can be found by static analysis. The problem with C and C++ is that the domain of 'normal' operations is much larger than Java, leading to more false positives in static analysis and/or less true positives.

blub 9y ago

The first time we ran static analysis on the C++ code base of a specific project, it found ~20 minor issues and a couple of medium severity ones which were mitigated by other checks. However, we also used 3rd-party open source C libraries, where it found thousands of problems. I'm talking about serious issues, memory leaks, invalid memory access, etc. P.S: I hope Scala implemented optional types better than Java, where the optional types themselves are nullable :)

pjmlp 9y ago
Optional types will eventually become value types on Java, you just need to wait until Java 10 for it.
edejong 9y ago
Well, technically you could write `val opt: Option[Int] = null`, but I've never seen it used and would seriously consider sending the author back to a course Scala for Dummies. It's interesting how many bugs can be found by static analysis. The problem with C and C++ is that the domain of 'normal' operations is much larger than Java, leading to more false positives in static analysis and/or less true positives.