Configurable and suppressable warnings

[adriaanm]

Motivation

Broken Windows Theory: clean codebases that keep warnings under control encourage to keep the codebase clean.

-Werror can often not be enabled, for example due to non-avoidable deprecation warnings when cross-building.

This proposal has two goals: make warnings globally configurable using compiler flags, and allow suppressing warnings locally.

What we have today

• @unchecked in pattern matching
  • on scrutinee: no exhaustivity check
  • in type patterns: no warning about unchecked erased types
• @unused: omit -Ywarn-unused / -Xlint:unused warnings for annotated declarations (added in Annotation unused to suppress warnings scala#7623, discussion at Helper for unused parameters bug#10790)
• @migration
  • with -Xmigration:<fromScalaVersion>, show warnings that have a version bigger than fromScalaVersion
  • not for everyone to use, the annotation is private[scala]

Considerations for new functionality

Global Configuration: allow users to configure what is reported as error, warning, info, or not at all.

• Generalization of -Werror, which escalates all warnings
• -Wconfig was proposed in deprecatedError + restricted annotation scala#7790 (comment)
  • only for configuring the propsed @restricted warnings
• deprecations
  • configure by since version -- for cross-building, upgrading (adriaan has a WIP, see below)
  • difficulty: since is not only used in standard library, each library has its own version numbers
  • scaladoc of deprecated says "Library authors should prepend the name of their library to the version number"
• lint, other flags in -W
  • configure by category
• Compiler warnings
  • configure by regex match?
• Compiler errors: are there any that can be downgraded to warnings?

Managing many errors/warnings

• -Xmaxerrs, -Xmaxwarns
• Summarizing
  • -deprecation and -feature to show all warnings, one-line-summary otherwise
  • Consider reporting deprecation and feature warnings by default bug#8829 suggest showing the warnings by default
  • perhaps the new config mechanism will subsume the two flags
  • note: the summary is a also a warning, so -Werror still breaks Consider reporting deprecation and feature warnings by default bug#8829
• Grouping: deprecations, maybe others
  • Show message once on first occurence, add a suffix ("x more occurences", maybe more details)

Local suppression

• support an annotation like @SuppressWarnings, @silent (see below)
• other tools (scalafix) should be able to use the same syntax?

Links, Discussions, WIPs

• suppress unchecked warnings globally bug#1781
  • asks to make the @unchecked annotation to work for an annotated scope, e.g. @unchecked class C { ... } for all code in a class
  • or a compiler flag to suppress warnings globally
• suppress deprecation warnings over a narrow scope bug#7934
  • asks for a way to disable warnings in a scope
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3506370/is-there-an-equivalent-to-suppresswarnings-in-scala
• Configurable and suppressable warnings #333: Configurable error reporting (2017)
  • SI-9350 Command option -Xreporter for custom error reporter scala#4544 -Xreporter command line
• WIP message suppression mechanism scala3#5337 WIP warning suppression for dotty
  • -Xsuppress-message-ids, -Xsuppress-warning-kinds global flags. dotty has error/warning ids and kinds (not sure what kinds are).
• scala/scala@2.13.x...adriaanm:deprconf WIP suppression / escalation for deprecations
  • -deprecation-suppress flag. conditions on: since, definition package, use site package
  • continued at [SUPERSEDED] Escalate or de-escalate deprecations scala#7728
• https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/277 Enhanced deprecations (in 9)
  • parameters for the annotation: forRemoval, since
• Promote -deprecation to -Xlint:deprecation scala#7714: Xlint check to ensure that @deprecated has explicit arguments
• deprecatedError + restricted annotation scala#7790
  • @restricted / @compileTimeOnly as generalization of @deprecated to mark APIs
  • severity parameter. (should we do that? or make them warnings, allow users to change severity?)
  • Stefan argues that having @deprecated with configurable reporting is enough / better than a new annotation (deprecatedError + restricted annotation scala#7790 (comment)).

Existing Tools

Java: @java.lang.SuppressWarnings

• supported: unchecked, deprecated, lint warnings (see javac -X to get the list). Eclipse supports may more (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1205995/what-is-the-list-of-valid-suppresswarnings-warning-names-in-java)

Silencer https://github.com/ghik/silencer

• @silent for scoped suppression
• @silent("deprecated") for message pattern, regular expresison
• compiler flag to error if nothing is silenced (good idea!)
• compiler flag for global filters (regexes)
• compiler flag for file name filters (regexes, unix-style paths, all warnings in those files are silenced)

Wartremover http://www.wartremover.org/

• Configuration in sbt: wartremoverErrors ++= Warts.unsafe, wartremoverWarnings ++= ...
• Local Suppression
  • @SuppressWarnings(Array("org.wartremover.warts.Var", "org.wartremover.warts.Null")) on declaration
  • wartremoverExcluded += baseDirectory.value / "src" / "main" / "scala" / "SomeFile.scala" in sbt

Related Topics

Downstream impact

• IDEs, support local suppression (e.g., for deprecations)
• sbt

Better warning & error messages (considered out of scope / separate proposal)

• Unique IDs for errors and warnings, à la dotty.
  • would be useful for scalameta: Classify/label reported messages with unique ID scalameta/scalameta#924
• Error explanations (dotty -explain, https://github.com/softwaremill/scala-clippy)
  • crowdsourcing Missing error messages scala3#1589
• https://contributors.scala-lang.org/t/towards-better-error-messages-in-scalac/1470/2 for previous discussions

Rough Syntax Proposal

Syntax needs to be clarified and probably made less ambiguous, so far i only thought about categories, filters and severities.

Global Configuration

-Wconf <config>

• categories
  • lint-x for every -Xlint:<x>, lint for all lints
  • x for every -W<x> (dead-code, value-discard, unused)
  • deprecation
  • language-x for every -language:<x>, language for all feature flags
  • in the future, when improving error/warnign messages, make new categories
  • any: matches any warning, whether or not it's in one of the categories above - filters
  • pos:com.package.Class where the warning is triggered, displayed
  • msg:expr -- need to decide details (full regex? only simple wildcard? substring match?)
  • only for deprecations: from:com.package.Class where the deprecated entity is declared
  • only for deprecations: since<2.12. see https://github.com/scala/scala/pull/7728/files#diff-3da64c3c223da7bbf9970ac26f9fb9b8R108. examples: since<Library 2.3, since<*2.3 to match any character prefix ("foo bar 2.3"), seems useful in combination with from:pkg
• severity:
  • e(rror)
  • w(arning) / w-summary / w-group
  • i(nfo) / i-summary / i-group: show, but don't fail on -Werror (useful?)
  • s(ilent)
• for warning and info:
  • summary: there were n warnings, per category.
  • group: show every warning with the same mesage once, mention how many instances.

Note: this only configures how warnings are emitted. -Xlint, -Wunused, Wdead-code etc are still required to make the compiler do the additional checks and emit warnings.

First matching rule wins

Relation to existing functionality

• compiler default: -Wconf deprecation:language:warning-summary,any:warning
• Adding a -Wconf adds rules on the left, i.e., the default comes last
• -deprecation is the same as -Wconf deprecation:warning
• -feature is -Wconf language:warning
• -language:x is -Wconf language-x:silent
• import scala.language.x is @silent("language-x") (see below)

Examples

• -Wconf any:pos:com.corp.yolo:silent
• -Wconf deprecation:from:org.fancy.library:since<*2.2:e,deprecation:i-group error on some deprecations, info-group others
• -Wconf 'any:msg:pure expression does nothing in statement position:s'

Local Suppression

@silent: basically the same as https://github.com/ghik/silencer#annotation-based-suppression

• on declarations @silent class C, @silent def f
• on expressions as annotation ascription: {foo; bar}: @silent
• by default, silence everything
• categories: @silent("deprecated"), @silent("deprecated,language-higherKinds")
• regex on message: @silent(msg="comparing true and false will always")
• compiler error if @silent doesn't silence anything

[SethTisue]

perhaps the right context to tackle this would be in association with backporting the structured-errors stuff form Dotty

[olafurpg]

This would be useful for tools like scalafix. In particular, it would be useful to have the ability override the severity level per message kind, despite presence of -Xfatal-warnings. It would also be useful to have unique identifiers attached to each reported message (cc/ scalameta/scalameta#924)

[ShaneDelmore]

Unique identifiers would be appreciated for scala-clippy as well. Currently we are using regexes to try to determine the message type.

[pmpfr]

The other thing that is sorely lacking currently is a general escape hatch mechanism usable per-use-site, e.g. @SuppressWarnings(Seq(CompilerWarning.MissingInterpolator)). Currently people often have to globally disable useful warning because of a tiny number of false positives.

[jvican]

I think having @warnoff or @suppressWarnings in the standard library would be very useful. Currently, linters are forced to use comments because if they used their own annotation that would add a runtime dependency on downstream users. This approach would be much extensible and elegant and could enable other tools to reuse them.

[pmpfr]

Agree. Wartremover uses @SuppressWarnings rather than comments, but only because it has to implement that itself. scalastyle uses comments, as you say, and it's very fragile/dangerous. It would be amazing if there was a single annotation where you could specify the particular warnings to silence, and it was respected by scalac, scalafix linters, wartremover, ...

[dwijnand]

Get excited? scala/scala3#5337

[dwijnand]

Maybe bundled with this we can do scala/bug#8829.