JPure
Purity Analysis is the problem of determining whether or not a method may have side-effects. This has applications in automatic parallelisation, extended static checking, and more. JPure is a novel purity system for Java that employs purity annotations which can be checked modularly. For example, you can add @Pure annotations as follows:
public class Doc {
private final List<String> items = ...;
...
@Pure boolean has(String x) {
Iterator iter = items.iterator();
while(iter.hasNext()) {
String i = iter.next();
if(x == i) { return true; }
}
return false;
}
}
This is done using a flow-sensitive, intraprocedural analysis. The system exploits two properties, called freshness and locality, to increase the range of methods that can be considered pure. JPure also includes an inference engine for annotating legacy code. JPure builds upon the Java Compiler Kit.
Notes. You will need to download the ANTLR runtime library as well (v3.2 last known to work); this should be loaded onto the classpath, or copied into the jpure/lib directory (where it should be picked up by the bin/jpure script).