Stringly-typed, catch-log-ignore, generates warnings in IDE anyway...
Fixed 90 of 125 errors that were found by a different technology... probably.could have been fixed by one developer in 1-2 days anyway - how long did this take?
I agree about the limitations, but look from another perspective, is it good use of time asking experienced engineers who get paid 300-500k/year to go and fix these issues? Probably no.
Would it bring them a joy finding simple leaks and fixing them? Probably no again.
Then this tool is a nice addition to the engineers
Besides, gotta start somewhere. It's probably a PoC, for a platform that will eventually handle all sorts of things.
I agree and I think we should give folks leeway to make progress but this seems to be the qualifier for nearly every GenAI demo I’ve seen
won't FileReader leak if the BufferedReader constructor throws?
Edit: Disregard the above, it was too naive.
It cannot leak because of a stronger warranty. In the JLS, it is specified that the try-with-resources track successfull initialisation of AutoClosable resources, not successful assignation. So one try with resources can desugar into the logical equivalent of multiple nested try-catch-finally !
In Java out of memory is signaled with an OutOfMemoryError which is a throwable (and can be caught) but is not technically an exception. Errors should generally never be caught and cannot be recovered from, which is how they differ from exceptions.
LLMs seems overkill for this. But of course letting it do general code reviews is not a bad idea. And static code analyzers aren't perfect. Doing this at scale might be a bit tricky though; you'd have to go file by file. I assume Uber might have many millions of lines of code to screen. And maybe their developers aren't that concerned with addressing warnings.
But going file by file might be simple enough. And you can probably screen for important stuff with some decent system prompt and instruct it to check for potential resource leaks and similar issues and produce detailed bug reports with some priority if it finds them and a diff that addresses the issue. Could be a nice use case for agentic AIs to screen code like this.
I think you'd be surprised, how many people do production code WITHOUT automated formatting / linting / static analysis.
Now these people and their managers are staring at the shiny new thing, the LLMs. They missing googling skills are fixed by LLMs ont heir everyday life, so they think a magic "code quality tool" (AI) would help them in they work.
To answer your question, obviously there are many linters/analyzers for Java (and for other languages too), both for static and dynamic code analysis, formatters, everything.
And once SonarQube flags a resource leak to a developer, a competent developer would learn from that and never make the same mistake again.
Now you can argue that this is not truly recovering from exception but it is a lot better than what you can do with most of the other Error subclasses. I said most because there are easy to recover from Error like the StackOverflowError where you just have to fail the operation or request that caused the error.
Let's say you get 1/100 requests that are randomly sent to your process. That 1 takes 100x the average memory usage of the others. You could spin it out to different services to better handle the weird one-off, but that doesn't always make sense. Sometimes you just need to be ok with working the 100x job and let the other 99 get progressive falloff retry. Different solutions are always possible.
No, you cannot. Catching, for example, StackOverflowError (which inherits from Error) can lead to very strange deadlocks and such (if locking is relying on try-finally discipline, as it should), even if you do "almost nothing" before re-throwing.
It's a huge hornet's nest of weirdness to even attempt to catch anything which derives directly from Error. (Rather than RuntimeException/Exception.)
EDIT: There are some really strange subclasses of Error now that I think about it. E.g. VirtualMachineError ... I don't think I've ever seen that in any logs, thankfully, but what exactly is the program (running on the failing VM) supposed to do if that is thrown? It'd be like trying to carry on or log an error if suddenly 1==2 turned out to be true.
An OutOfMemoryError is a VirtualMachineError. The Java runtime doesn't technically contain the idea of "finite memory". The language sort of assumes there's an infinite amount of memory. When there isn't and the VM is forced to throw an OutOfMemoryError it's technically a breach of the abstraction of the language and the VM is unable to continue working.