A lot has happened in the years since 1.1.0 so these are just the highlights.
-
Pulse is now enabled by default and replaces Biabduction as the default memory and value analysis engine for Infer. Pulse powers a lot of issue types historically reported by other checkers, such as null dereferences, memory/resource leaks, reads of uninitialised values, as well as a range of new issue types such as (user-configurable) tainted data flows and C++ unnecessary object copies.
-
The Resource Leak checker for .NET and Uninitialized Value checkers have been removed and their functionality moved to Pulse for improved precision.
-
The linter framework ASTLanguage (AL) has been removed (previously deprecated). Other clang-based linter frameworks such as clang-tidy can be used instead.
-
Eradicate has been removed (previously deprecated).
-
Two other checkers have been deleted: Config Checks between Markers (previously experimental) and Immutable Cast (previously deprecated).
-
Biabduction is now deprecated in favour of Pulse.
-
Quandary is now deprecated in favour of Pulse's taint analysis.
-
New checker: Lineage produces inter-procedural data flow graphs for Erlang code and provides commands to query taint paths in it.
-
New checker: Parameter Not Null Checked for Objective-C, replacing the PARAMETER_NOT_NULL_CHECKED bug type reported by biabduction.
-
New checker: Scope Leakage for Java and Kotlin, verifying that certain classes can never retain others in a configurable way.
-
Annotation Reachability: support for C++ was dropped and Java support was improved to support using regexps to model annotated functions, and having field accesses as sinks.
-
New Erlang frontend. You can analyse Erlang code compiling with
erlc
,rebar3
orbuck2
. -
New Hack frontend, based on
hackc
. -
New "Textual" intermediate frontend. Textual is a new input format that frontend writers may use to emit SIL, either in text form or from OCaml directly. It is currently used by the Hack frontend. Textual can also be used to write analysis models, i.e. stubs for certain functions that will be used during the analysis as if they were these functions' implementations.
-
Clang upgraded to version 18.
-
buck2 support.
- Incremental mode much improved, see the new
--incremental-analysis
flag in the updated workflow for CI document.
-
infer report
now generates the report files (eg infer-out/report.json) afresh from the stored analysis summaries on disk. The command doesn't dump the summaries to the console anymore, you can useinfer debug --procedures --procedures-summary
to do so. -
New option to dump a SARIF report of the issues found by infer:
--sarif
.
- New JSON input format for SIL. This new format was contributed from Infer#, whose C# frontend for Infer emits SIL as JSON using this format.
- Clang upgraded to version 11.0
- Liveness: properly handle exceptional control flow
- Pulse:
- Added preliminary Java support
- New Uninitialized value bug type, aiming to replace the previous Uninit checker as this one is inter-procedural and more precise.
- OPTIONAL_EMPTY_ACCESS is now enabled by default
- NEW checker Topl(early alpha): An experimental checker framework: write your own analysis as a state machine representing a temporal property over multiple memory objects at once, eg to write a taint analysis. Topl is based on Pulse.
- Miscellaneous improvements to cost, inferbo, nullsafe, racerd, starvation
AL is now deprecated and may be removed in future versions.
- reporting format improvements (the trace is no longer included in the report text, only as metadata)
- disable some less-used bug types
- remove "Field not mutable" check
- Now defaults to "angelic" ownership: an unknown function is assumed to return owned objects.
- No more reports on races on paths rooted on temporary or local variables, as these are unreliably modelled.
Litho Required Properties: new Java checker to check that all non-optional @Props have been specified when constructing Litho components. Self in Block: new Objective-C checker to detect when an Objective-C block incorrectly captures self Starvation
- New experimental "global" analysis mode. Enable with
--starvation-whole-program
Miscellaneous improvements to most checkers, in particular Annotation Reachability, Cost Analysis, Eradicate, Inefficient Keyset Iterator, InferBO, Pulse, RacerD, Starvation, and Uninitialized Value.
- The Gradle integration now captures Java files in parallel
- New Buck integration for Java, enable with
--buck-java-flavor
- Clang upgraded to version 9.0
- New subcommand
infer help
to display information about checkers and issue types. - New subcommand
infer debug
that replaces the uses ofinfer explore
not related to reported issues. --debug
no longer disables filtering, you have to pass-g -F
to get the previous behaviour back.- All disk artefacts (except the Java type environment) are now stored in the SQLite database in infer-out/results.db. The contents of the database can be explored with
infer debug
. - Changed how to select the Buck integration. The old command line interface is still supported but is now deprecated.
- clang via "flavors", activated with
--flavors
, now with--buck-clang
- clang via "compilation DB", activated with
--buck-compilation-database
, unchanged - Java via "genrule", activated with
--genrule-master-mode
, now with--buck-java
- Java "without genrules", used to be activated by not specifying any other Buck mode, deleted
- In addition, there is a new Java integration, activated with
--buck-java-flavor
- clang via "flavors", activated with
- The textual version of the report infer-out/bugs.txt has moved to infer-out/report.txt. The bugs.txt file is still created with dummy contents to allow for a smooth transition.
- Removed the
--report-hook
option. - Properly terminate on
Control-C
instead of sometimes leaving around zombie processes. - Spec files (summaries) are now stored in the database. Explore with
infer debug --procedures --procedures-summary
.
- Revamped online documentation for bug types and checkers. See the list of all issue types and the pages for each checker. The
infer help
command can be used locally to also get this information and more. - Access the documentation for previous and future versions online.
- The https://fbinfer.com/ website now uses Docusaurus 2.
- Folded the facebook-clang-plugins sub-repo inside the infer repository; there is no more git submodule for it.
- Improve internal documentation of OCaml source code.
- Build with OCaml 4.11.1 and dune 2.7.1
- Migrated our Python 2 code to OCaml
- Split the infer OCaml source code into individual dune libraries.
- Better defaults for SQLite, and a write daemon to reduce contention.
- New analysis schedulers that speed up the analysis phase. Enable with
--scheduler callgraph
or--scheduler restart
. - Infer no longer builds by default in "opt" mode (optimised, using OCaml’s flambda pass). The default is now "dev", which does not include as many optimisations (hence builds faster) and turns warnings into errors.
- The starvation checker is now based on SIL instead of HIL.
- There's a new
--inefficient-keyset-iterator
checker for finding inefficient uses of Java's keyset iterators that retrieve both key and value (on by default). - Complete the set of Android thread annotations and Java nullability annotations. Updated artifacts are available on Maven Central.
--starvation
is now on by default. This analysis catches problems with threads not being able to make progress due to locking issues, incorrect scheduling priorities, etc. For instance, on Android calling Future.get from a UiThread without a sensible timeout will be flagged as a starvation issue.- New Objective-C linter for calls to
@optional
methods:UNSAFE_CALL_TO_OPTIONAL_METHOD
, enabled by default. - A new call-graph scheduler (
--call-graph-schedule
) improves performance of the analysis phase of Infer, especially when the number of files to analyze is less than available CPUs. - A new flag
--oom-threshold
allows to throttle the analysis when the amount of free memory is below the provided threshold. - New genrule based Buck/Java integration is much faster than the previous one, use with
--genrule-master-mode
. - Infer's internal clang is now in version 8.0.0.
- Update to javalib 3.1 provides better compatibility with Java 9 and Java 11. Refer to their change log for more details.
- Infer can now be built and run on MacOS Mojave without fiddling with
SDKROOT
(although you still might need it with non-standard toolchain setup). - [β] Pulse is a new experimental lifetime analysis for C++, give it a try with
--pulse
. Beware that it doesn't report much yet. --ownership
checker was superseded by Pulse and removed.
Backend analyses:
- A brand new analysis to compute the runtime cost of methods and functions: passing
--cost
(off by default) to Infer will output a costs-report.json file describing, among others, the computational complexity of each function in the code using the big-O notation, egO(1)
,O(list.length)
, ... - The deadlock detection analysis has been ported to C++ and Objective-C and mainly focuses on self-deadlocks (taking a mutex twice). Activate with
--starvation
(off by default). - The data race detector RacerD has been ported to Objective-C and detects races on fields protected by a C++ mutex. It reports "Thread Safety Violation" and "GuardedBy Violation" errors on Java and "Lock Consistency Violation" on C++ and Objective-C. Activate with
--racerd
(on by default). - A progress bar is displayed while the analysis is running
- Countless improvements and tweaks, in particular in RacerD and in analyses for C++.
Frontends:
- Infer now ships with clang version 7.0.1
- Support for Java up to version 11
- switch infer license to MIT
- publish binaries
- [clang] lots of improvements to the frontend
- New checker:
--ownership
detects a subset of use-after-free issues due to bad manual memory management. This is a rough prototype of Rust-style borrow checker for C++. (enabled by default, C++) - New checker:
--uninit
detects uses of uninitialized values (enabled by default, C/C++/Objective-C) - New checker:
--racerd
now also detects inconsistent lock usage in C++. Also improved the lock domain to reduce false positives for all languages. - Improved C++ support: destructors are now properly translated; addresses and pointers are handled more precisely
- Improved retain cycles detection (Objective-C)
- Upgraded the internal clang to clang 7
- [internal] SQLite is being used to store some of infer's analysis artefacts instead of storing them in files on disk. This improves analysis speed and reduces load on the OS.
This is a fix for the 0.13.0 release, whose build broke due to changes in opam.
- Infer now runs multiple checkers at the same time by default, including the biabduction analysis that was the previous and only default. In particular, we are pleased to introduce RacerD for race detection in Java. The following checkers are activated by default: annotation reachability (Java), biabduction (C/C++/ObjC, Java), fragment retains view (Java), immutable cast (Java), liveness (C/C++/ObjC), printf args (Java), quandary (C/C++/ObjC, Java), RacerD (C/C++/ObjC, Java), SIOF (C/C++/ObjC). Each checker may report several issue types.
- Upgraded to clang 5.0
- Richer DSL for writing linters (AL), and a new default linter for
const
pointers in Objective-C - Lots of perf improvements and bug fixes, and improved logging
Please note the following breaking changes:
-a eradicate
is now simply--eradicate
and can run alongside other checkersinferTraceBugs
is now theexplore
subcommand:infer explore --help
- infer now depends on sqlite
Hotfix release to update infer's opam dependencies to cope with upgrades of cppo in opam (in particular, #718).
- introduces subcommands and man pages for all subcommands
- This release introduces AL, a language for writing linters against the clang AST. AL lets you check syntactic properties of source code by traversing the AST of the program. Using the included domain-specific language (DSL), you can write your own set of checks.
- [Java] ThreadSafety analyzer is now on by default; run it with
infer -a checkers ...
. This checker will try and detect races (unprotected concurrent accesses with at least one write) in classes bearing the@ThreadSafe
annotation. - Infer now builds using OCaml 4.04.0.
- [Clang] C++ support.
- [Clang] Improved support for cmake and Xcode compilation databases. Use with
infer --compilation-database compile_commands.json
(for cmake and Buck), or withinfer --compilation-database-escaped compile_commands.json
(for xcbuild and xcpretty). - [C++] New SIOF Checker.
- [iOS] New linter for target SDK version. Use with
infer --iphoneos-target-sdk-version <min version you support> ...
or withinfer -a linters --iphoneos-target-sdk-version <min version you support> ...
. - [Java] New Thread Safety Checker.
- [Java] Smarter analysis of dynamic dispatch.
- [Java] Improved Maven integration.
- [Java]
@SuppressWarnings
support removed. Use@SuppressLint
instead.android.annotation.SuppressLint
is only available on Android, but do let us know if that is an issue for you.
fix for #577
- [Java] preliminary support for Java 8: infer no longer skips methods containing Java 8 code
- [clang] support for clang compilation databases
- [Xcode] more robust integration using the compilation database (requires xcpretty)
- [iOS] added checks for some of the ComponentKit best practices
- lots of under-the-hood improvements, including perf improvements and bug fixes
- Fix issues with using Infer with Clang 4.0 and Xcode 8
- Various fixes and performance improvements
No changelog.
- enable packaging via Homebrew
- fix an issue with locales
- lots of perf improvements and fixes across all analyses (thanks to everyone who reported issues and made pull requests!)
- [experimental] C++ language support. See
--cxx
ininfer --help
. This is still in heavy development and only includes a few bug types. Feedback welcome!
- [Objective-C and C] upgrade clang to version 3.8.0
- [all] bugfixes
- New
--reactive
mode to rapidly analyze the effects of a code change. Be sure to check out the documentation of the new workflow. As a result, the incremental mode (--incremental
) is now deprecated. - New XML output, compatible with output from other static analyzers, eg PMD. To use it, pass the
--pmd-xml
flag to Infer (seeinfer --help
). - Use
@SuppressWarnings("infer")
in your Java projects to annotate methods or classes where Infer shouldn't report. - This release incorporates a number of contributions (#284 #289 #300 #301) and addresses a number of issues (#279 #281 #283 #288 #291 #294).
- addresses a number of bugs, eg #270 #274 #275 #276
- [all] add summary of the analysis results at the end of the console output
- [android] new "Fragment retains View" checker
- [android] fixed intermittent infinite loop
- [iOS] new check for capturing a C++ reference in an Objective-C block
- [android] detection of context leaks
- [android] support for
@PerformanceCritical
and@Expensive
method annotations. Infer will check that an expensive method is never called during the execution of a performance critical method (run it withinfer -a checkers -- ...
). - [iOS] new check to catch strong delegate properties, likely to create retain cycles
- [iOS] new check to catch direct accesses to atomic properties, which can cause race conditions
- [all] performance improvements all-around
No changelog.
No changelog.
- [java] analyze class files with $$ in the name (closes #3 more)
- [java] don't fail on compilation warnings (closes #18)
- [clang] support __nullable et al. (closes #4)
- add an Infer:Checkers for printf arguments
- [java] no more crash on class names containing "$$" (closes #3)
- [java] model for
assert
(closes #68) - [objective-c] support for
@import
(closes #2) - [c family] Infer now always reports on the right line numbers (closes #31)
- [c family] fix c++ compilation errors (closes #37)
Initial release