Software Open Access
NullAway: Practical Type-Based Null Safety for Java
Subarno Banerjee; Lazaro Clapp; Manu Sridharan
NullAway is a tool to help eliminate NullPointerExceptions (NPEs) in your Java code. To use NullAway, first add @Nullable annotations in your code wherever a field, method parameter, or return value may be null. Given these annotations, NullAway performs a series of type-based, local checks to ensure that any pointer that gets dereferenced in your code cannot be null. NullAway is similar to the type-based nullability checking in the Kotlin and Swift languages, and the Checker Framework and Eradicate null checkers for Java.
NullAway is fast. It is built as a plugin to Error Prone and can run on every single build of your code. In our measurements, the build-time overhead of running NullAway is usually less than 10%. NullAway is also practical: it does not prevent all possible NPEs in your code, but it catches most of the NPEs we have observed in production while imposing a reasonable annotation burden.
| Name | Size | |
|---|---|---|
|
NullAway.zip
md5:75e5d0832a11be2694576dc28db1d7e2 |
1.3 MB | Download |
| All versions | This version | |
|---|---|---|
| Views | 238 | 238 |
| Downloads | 15 | 15 |
| Data volume | 18.8 MB | 18.8 MB |
| Unique views | 217 | 217 |
| Unique downloads | 15 | 15 |
- Publication date:
- July 1, 2019
- DOI:
-
- Keyword(s):
- static code analysis pluggable type systems null safety java
- Meeting:
- 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE '19), Tallinn, Estonia, 26-30 August, 2019
- License (for files):
- MIT License