Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship • Hacker News Board

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#11

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 4:39 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#12

Post by adamnemecek » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

hiou wrote: post #7

adamnemecek wrote: post #4

Seems like mentioning the sorts of bugs this can detect should be the most important thing on the landing page.

> At present, the analyzer reports problems caused by null pointer access and resource and memory leaks, which cause a large percentage of app crashes. Did you mean you were looking for something more specific?

I was looking for something like this http://fbinfer.com/docs/infer-bug-types.html

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#13

Post by adamnemecek » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

amirmc wrote: post #6

adamnemecek wrote: post #4

Seems like mentioning the sorts of bugs this can detect should be the most important thing on the landing page.

I found a list at http://fbinfer.com/docs/infer-bug-types.html

thanks.

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#14

Post by guepe » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

The types of issues discovered (they mention null pointer access and resource and memory leaks) is much smaller than what a tool like Coverity will find (I use it). And they analyze C and Java, two languages supported by Coverity, a very mature tool...

I am not certain of the proposed value, except it's free to other than Facebook - but not to Facebook, who pays engineers to develop this... Is this some kind of NIH syndrom by Facebook, or is there something I missed ?

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#15

Post by gschrader » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

How does this compare to other static code analysis tools like Findbugs, PMD, Checkstyle, etc?

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#16

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

Gave it a quick trial for iOS... doesn't seem great. It doesn't run at all when giving it a whole project (no response, no CPU usage, not even when you feed it BS arguments), it gives a "Starting Analysis" and nothing else for other (simple) files, it doesn't understand the newish 'nullable' keyword, and it will quit with a fatal error if it can't resolve an import (like UIKit), so pretty unusable on single files. I'm not convinced by the bug types it checks for either - doesn't xcode / the Clang analyser do those same checks itself and then some?

Just opened the example in xcode, the analyzer itself already highglights a lot of issues, like the nil dereferencing: http://i.imgur.com/CdiYRYX.png. If it's written in more modern objective-C and supports the nullable/nonnull type, the compiler will also warn / fail to build when trying to assign nil to a nonnull type.

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#17

Post by aristus » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 5:05 PM UTC

amirmc wrote: post #3

More OCaml code coming out of FB. Can add this to the list, which includes, Hack, Flow and Pfff [1]. The kinds of bugs it finds are listed at: http://fbinfer.com/docs/infer-bug-types.html It's interesting to see how building tools with languages like OCaml can reduce bugs for teams, without them having to change the language itself. I do wonder what things would be like if such languages we're used directly more wide…

Legend has it there is a small room at FBHQ, containing a quorum of OCaml committers, all of them French for some reason, hacking away at level of abstraction beyond the ken of mortal man.

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#18

Post by Alupis » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 5:08 PM UTC

guepe wrote: post #14

The types of issues discovered (they mention null pointer access and resource and memory leaks) is much smaller than what a tool like Coverity will find (I use it). And they analyze C and Java, two languages supported by Coverity, a very mature tool... I am not certain of the proposed value, except it's free to other than Facebook - but not to Facebook, who pays engineers to develop this... Is this some kind of NIH s…

Findbugs is also very good for Java apps, and is free. (Developed by the University of Maryland)[1]

[1] http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#19

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

Can someone explain-it-like-I'm-a-90s-programmer (ELi90s?) why so much symbolic evaluation stuff gets done in OCaml? What does OCaml do that makes it so well suited for this problem domain? (I know a very little bit about symbolic evaluation and have done a very very little bit of it).

Re: Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

#20

Post by istvan__ » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

I am extremely happy to see Facebook using OCaml, it is good the get some more traction in that community. I hope it gains velocity over time and becomes a viable option especially for startups where there is no technical debt. It has amazing features and as you can see even very complex problems can be solved in a concise, terse way. Kudos to Facebook on this one.