How to track state of operand stack by FindBugs 3.0.1

Yesterday I released findbugs-slf4j v1.2.0, which supports more useful analysis based on OpcodeStackDetector.

Here I will summarize my problem and solution.

What is TOP?

Problem is that my detector could not track state of OpcodeStack, because stack becomes TOP. I cannot get elements in stack. if stack is TOP.

• issue #29: Can't get stack offset 0 from []
• issue #30: too many output is displayed

What TOP means? It comes from the lattice. You may refer following papers for detail:

• http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~juncao/links/doctoral/Bib/RHS96.pdf
• http://www.bodden.de/pubs/bodden12inter-procedural.pdf

In context of my plugin, it means that findbugs plugin cannot decide state of Item when it joins separated operation flows (e.g. after for-loop, after if-block and in catch-block). So I cannot get Item from OpcodeStack.

How to define join operation for FindBugs?

Check merge(Item, Item) method in OpcodeStack.

But if you use userValue in Item, it should be hard to join Item because this merge method just compares two userValue and set it to merged Item only when two Items are equal.

What can be solution?

In my case, I stopped using userValue. There are some alternative solutions:

• specialKind defined in Item might be good way to mark Item
  • It has different and complex logic to merge two Items
• Use methods in Item class, if FindBugs already track and hold its state
  • In my case, Item#getJavaClass() replaced userValue