Thanks Marius for bringing up this topic. POI is quite an old code base and I think it is safe to assume that virtually any return type can be null and that inputs can often be null too.
If we start annotating the code, we would probably need to cover as many methods as possible because it would be confusing to have the annotations in some places but not in others. There is a discussion about doing a 5.0.0 release because it is a while since we did any releases. I'd prefer not to delay a release for this. We could certainly consider it after the next release. On Wednesday 2 December 2020, 22:37:46 GMT, Marius Volkhart <mar...@volkhart.com> wrote: Hello, As I've been working more with POI, I frequently find myself looking at the javadoc and source for whether or not a function can return null. I wanted to ask, would a contribution adding nullability annotations be welcomed? The basic idea is to annotate return values and method parameters with something like @Nullable and @NonNull. IDEs, static analysis tools, etc can then recognize these annotations and provide hints or analysis to the developer. For users of languages like Kotlin, that have stronger concepts of nullability, this is particularly helpful. The first consideration would be which annotations to use. A lot has been written on this. The JSR-305 FindBugs annotations come with licensing and legal concerns <https://github.com/google/guava/issues/2960> for example. However, projects like Spring Framework <https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/issues/20099> have found ways around this. If indeed this contribution is of interest, I can go into more details on annotation selection and all that. The next consideration is how to do this without 1. making the POI codebase a mess, and 2. without making the task so monumental that one cannot complete it. Again, if the contribution is of interest, I can go into more details of a plan for anyone interested. -- Cheers, Marius Volkhart --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@poi.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@poi.apache.org
