[eclipse.org-architecture-council] Encourage projects to use JDT null an

[Marcel Bruch <marcel.bruch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Architecture Council,

I spent some time on analyzing and visualizing user error reports. 
One result of that analysis that strikes me most is that NullPointerExceptions are the #1 root cause of all error reports. 
It’s also ~4 times more popular than #2 on that list: IllegalArgumentException (*).

I wonder whether the architecture council should encourage projects to tackle these errors, e.g., by enforcing or requesting all projects to use JDT’s null analysis and @Nullable/@NonNull annotations on every public API. Is that something the AC can drive and promote?

As a second means, the EPP Committer package may enable JDT’s null analysis by default to get that started.

It would also need a few popular projects to lead the way. I’m thinking of Platform/Platform UI and JDT but… of course… it’s additional work for them… But I hope this pays out for Eclipse as a whole rather soon.
I can also imagine to ask all projects that participate in Neon to work towards this goal.

What do others think?


Cheers,
Marcel



(*) Please visit [1] to confirm that observation (Note: org.eclipse.epp.internal.logging.StandInException and org.eclipse.recommenders.internal.StandInException are not counted.
[1] https://dev.eclipse.org/recommenders/committers/dashboard/#/dashboard/Problems