Infer for Erlang - a static analysis tool used by WhatsApp

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Infer is a static analysis tool by Meta: GitHub - facebook/infer: A static analyzer for Java, C, C++, and Objective-C

By its description, “Infer is a static analysis tool for Java, C++, Objective-C, and C. Infer is written in OCaml.”

Yesterday I learned that it is being used to analyze Erlang code at WhatsApp.

Trying Infer on Simple Erlang Code

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There is also this paper:
InfERL: Scalable and Extensible Erlang Static Analysis

Thanks, Luiz Aoki.

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@adolfont thanks for sharing.

I tried to build infer without success (nightmare Ocaml dependencies).
Then, i tested the Linux (Ubuntu 22.04LTS) prebuilt version but it doesn’t support Erlang.

$ ./bin/infer --pulse-only -- erlc ex1.erl
Usage Error: Unsupported build command 'erlc'.
If this is an alias for another build system that infer supports, you can use
`--force-integration <command>` where <command> is one of the following supported build systems:
  ant
  buck
  cc
  gradle
  java
  javac
  make
  mvn
  ndk-build
  xcodebuild

Same on macOS:

$ brew install infer                                                                                                                ─╯
==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula.jws.json

==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.jws.json
################################################################################################################################ 100.0%
Error: infer has been disabled because it does not build

@adolfont Any chance to make prebuilt versions for macOS and Linux with Erlang support?

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Hey! I’m Akos, one of the maintainers of the Erlang support in Infer at WhatsApp. Thanks for your interest! I’ll check with the core Infer team to see if they plan to do a release any time soon. The latest one is from 2021 March and we started to work on Erlang support just after that.

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@hajduakos this is great. Thanks

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