Null Check Analysis

Osman, Haidar (July 2015). Null Check Analysis. In: Extended Abstracts of the Eighth Seminar on Advanced Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution (SATToSE 2015). Mons, Belgium. 06.-08.07.2015.

Text Osma15a.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (132kB) | Request a copy

Null dereferencing is one of the most frequent bugs in Java systems causing programs to crash due to the uncaught NullPointerException. Developers often fix this bug by introducing a guard (i.e., null check) on the potentially-null objects before using them. In this paper we investigate the null checks in 717 open-source Java systems to understand when and why developers introduce null checks. We find that 35 of the if-statements are null checks. A deeper investigation shows that 71 of the checked-for-null objects are returned from method calls. This indicates that null checks have a serious impact on performance and that developers introduce null checks when they use methods that return null.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

1 since deposited on 29 Jun 2016
0 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item