Detecting defects in Erlang programs using static analysis
Konstantinos Sagonas · 2007
This talk will review the main techniques used in the Dialyzer (Discrepancy AnaLYZer of ERlang programs) defect detection tool. Dialyzer employs various forms of static program analysis to automatically identify software errors in large applications written in Erlang, a concurrent functional language developed by Ericsson and commonly used for developing telecommunications software. Dialyzer is completely automatic, relatively fast, requires no annotations from its user to detect defects, and is exceptional in that it does not report any false positives. The heart of Dialyzer's analysis is inter-modular inference of success typings for Erlang functions and the talk will explain what success typings are and how they differ from type inference in statically typed language.