Hello Java developers,
During the last 6 months we did a full rewrite of our Java analyzer and its 550+ rules to use the Eclipse Compiler for Java (ECJ, part of Eclipse JDT Core Component). Why? ECJ offers an incredibly more precise semantic resolution, which leads to more accurate results and fewer false positives for rules that use semantic information. In addition to the overall improvements, this move allowed us to fix 24 bugs and 19 false-positive tickets.
Support of Java 13
You can now analyze your Java 13 code. Only preview features of Java 13 are supported (new switch expression using “yield”, text blocks). Preview feature of Java 12 (switch expression using “break”) is no longer supported and files using it will be ignored.
Java API for Custom Rules
The rewrite of the Java analyzer changes nothing in the existing public APIs. Custom rules should continue to work as before. Custom rules using the symbol table will also benefit from the new increased accuracy and raise fewer false positives.
Rule Identifiers
To be consistent with the other SonarSource analyzers, the rules’s identifier was changed from “squid” to “java”. This should be mostly transparent on all SonarQube instances (>= 7.9 LTS) and SonarCloud with the exception of the use of @SuppressWarnings referencing squid identifiers, which was forgotten and will be fixed by https://jira.sonarsource.com/browse/SONARJAVA-3268 (fixed by v6.0.1)
Performance
Unfortunately, the accuracy gain comes with a performance cost. You may experience some performance impacts on your analysis (in some cases it can be two times slower). We will try in the coming months to reduce these impacts.
Edit 2020-01-28: if you are facing huge performance regression, please create a dedicated thread so we can easily exchange with you.
JaCoCo Binary Format
The JaCoCo .exec format is no longer supported. This feature was deprecated in April 2019. Java projects should now use on the JaCoCo XML format for coverage, as described here: [Coverage & Test Data] Importing JaCoCo coverage report in XML format
Rules Changes
The rule S3340 (Annotation arguments should appear in the order in which they were declared) is removed because annotation argument order can not be guaranteed when reading from bytecode.
The rule S1188 was split into two distinct rules:
- S5612: Lambdas should not have too many lines
- S1188: Anonymous classes should not have too many lines
For more information, see the changelog.
The new Java analyzer is already available on SonarCloud. For SonarQube users, these new features will be built into the next version (8.2). In the meantime, you can get them now by upgrading to v6.0 of the Java analysis engine.
Cheers
Alex
