False positive NULL_DEREFERENCE for Airlift ConfigurationInspector

[electrum]

https://github.com/airlift/airlift

configuration/src/main/java/io/airlift/configuration/ConfigurationInspector.java:98: error: NULL_DEREFERENCE
  object returned by metadata.getAttributes() could be null and is dereferenced at line 98
  096.   
  097.               ImmutableSortedSet.Builder<ConfigAttribute> builder = ImmutableSortedSet.naturalOrder();
  098. >             for (AttributeMetadata attribute : metadata.getAttributes().values()) {
  099.                   String propertyName = prefix + attribute.getInjectionPoint().getProperty();
  100.                   Method getter = attribute.getGetter();

getAttributes() returns a final field which is always initialized as non-null in the constructor.

[sblackshear]

Hi David,
Thanks for this report and your others. Unfortunately, you have run into one of the dark corners of Infer: our Java 8 support. The frontend we use to parse Java bytecodes is a third-party library that does not yet support Java 8 (we are working on encouraging the maintainers to add support or do it ourselves). As a result, some classes may parse incorrectly, and some may fail to parse altogether. I will look into this issue and see if it is something unrelated to Java 8, but just a heads-up that anything using Java 8 can lead to strange results.

[sblackshear]

I looked into this. What is happening is not related to Java 8. Instead, the analysis times out on the constructor for AttributeMetadata, which means that it does not know the fields have been initialized to a non-null value. We will work on fixing the timeout and/or making the analysis act more angelically in such cases.