[CASSANDRA-18239] Replace eclipse warnings based static code analysis with something better (CheckerFramework)

• Type: Task
• Status: Review In Progress
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Fix Version/s: 5.0.x, 5.x
• Component/s: Build
• Labels: code-polishing
• Epic Link: Code Style & Static Analysis
• Change Category: Quality Assurance
• Complexity: Normal
• Platform: All

Test and Documentation Plan

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/pull/2370

Test link in the PR

• Assignee: Jacek Lewandowski
• Reporter: Jacek Lewandowski

Authors

Jacek Lewandowski

Reviewers

Piotr Kolaczkowski, Stefan Miklosovic

• Created: 06/Feb/23 13:00
• Updated: 07/Dec/23 19:57

Description

Eclipse warnings is used for static code analysis. However, it does not fit well into Cassandra code and practically we end up explicitly adding suppressions in many places just to satisfy that tool rather than fix the real issues.

This is an incomplete list of reasons to remove it:

• not closed resources are detected incorrectly
• does not recognize custom utility methods used to close the resources, which use use heavily in the code, like Throwables.close, FileUtils.close, closeQuietly...
• because of the above, we cannot make important things like Ref to implement Closeable as it would make the tool to explode with tons of warnings
• it complains about correct generics - something like "method X is not applicable for ..." when the code compiles successfully is not acceptable
• it is old and not maintained

There are better tools like IntelliJ inspections for example, which can also be run in headless mode

As agreed on the dev mailing list we will replace it in trunk with CheckerFramework.

Issue Links

• is related to: CASSANDRA-16895 Build with Java 17
• is related to: CASSANDRA-18190 ECJ upgrade
• is related to: CASSANDRA-18390 Run Sonar analyzer over the Cassandra project
• supercedes: CASSANDRA-18077 Add SpotBugs to the build
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #2370