Laura M Castro and Brujo
Learn how to clean up your large Erlang projects by
detecting and removing code that’s no longer needed with the highest
level of confidence using Hank, an open-source plugin for rebar3.
The presence of source code that is no longer needed is a handicap to
project maintainability. The larger and longer-lived the project, the
higher the chances of accumulating dead code in its different forms.
Manually detecting unused code is time-consuming, tedious,
error-prone, and requires a great level of deep knowledge about the
codebase. In this talk, we examine the kinds of dead code
(specifically, oxbow code) that can appear in Erlang projects, and
formulate rules to identify them with high accuracy.
We also present an open-source static analyzer that implements these
rules, allowing for the automatic detection and confident removal of
oxbow code in Erlang codebases, actively contributing to increasing
their quality and maintainability.