Leveraging static analysis in an IDE

Abstract

In recent years, Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have risen from nicety to an essential part of most programming language tool-chains. Indeed, they are widely seen as critical to the widespread adoption of a new programming language. This is due in part to the emergence of a higher-level dialogue between a developer and his code, made possible by advanced tooling that aids in navigating, understanding, and manipulating code. In turn, much of this advanced tooling relies heavily on various forms of static analysis. Unfortunately, many practitioners of static analysismethods are notwell skilled in incorporating their analyses into an IDEcontext. The result is often high-powered tools that lack key usability characteristics, and thus fall short of their potential to assist developers. This tutorial attempts to help bridge the skill gap by describing several applications of static analysis within an IDE setting. We describe the computation and presentation of type hierarchy information, data flow information in the form of def/use chains, the use of a type inferencing engine to detect type-related code "smells", and the use of memory effects analysis to determine the safety of certain parallelization-related refactorings. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.