I got a chance to attend Facebook Developer Conference F8 this year thanks to Systers, and I’d love to share with you the most interesting things that I’ve learned there.
As a developer, my favorite sessions were about a new Facebook tool called Infer. This tool allows the Facebook team to use automation to deliver reliable code at scale.
Infer is a static analysis tool for finding bugs in the code without executing it.
Inter goes line by line and analyzes the code, if there’s a function call, it goes to that function and reads through it and provides summary. There’s no need to reanalyze a method again if it has not changed. Infer gives back a code review, so developer can quickly fix the bug.
Infer can find over 80 types of bugs, here’s a list of the most popular ones:
· Null dereference
· Resource leak
· Race conditions
· Taint analysis
· Starvation
The tool is constantly being developed, and new features are added. Recently they released the Cost Analysis feature that tells you the complexity of your code.
Infer works with any project written in Java/C/C++/Objective C.
If you’re curious about Infer, this is a good place to start https://fbinfer.com/. Also take a look at this awesome hands-on lab that was demoed by Jules Villard during F8.
Going forward I’ll be sure to include Infer in the set of tools I use for my Java projects.
It was also great to hear all about how Facebook changes their products by making them smaller and lighter, so they could be used across the world, especially in developing countries where the Internet connection is not great and people don’t have the newest Pixel phone or an iPhone. If you’d like to learn more about those topics, I encourage you to look at this video.
You can find all the sessions here.
