Kotlin from the Point of View of Static Analysis Developer

Abstract

This paper describes a static analysis tool for finding defects, analyzing metrics and relations for programs written in the Kotlin language. The approach is implemented in the Svace static analyzer developed at the Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The paper focuses on the problems we faced during the implementation, the approaches we used to solve them, and the experimental results for the tool we built. The tool not only supports Kotlin but is also capable of analyzing mixed projects that use both Java and Kotlin. We hope that this paper will be useful to static analysis developers and language designers.