Static Analyzers and Potential Future Research Directions for Scala: An Overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews static analysis tools for Scala, discussing their capabilities, limitations, and proposing future research directions to enhance static analyzers for the language.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing Scala static analyzers, analyzes their limitations, and suggests new research avenues for improvement.

Findings

Identifies various static analyzers available for Scala

Highlights limitations and gaps in current tools

Proposes future research directions for static analysis in Scala

Abstract

Static analyzers are tool sets which are proving to be indispensable to modern programmers. These enable the programmers to detect possible errors and security defects present in the current code base within the implementation phase of the development cycle, rather than relying on a standalone testing phase. Static analyzers typically highlight possible defects within the 'static' source code and thus does not require the source code to be compiled or executed. The Scala programming language has been gaining wider adoption across various industries in recent years. With such a wide adoption of tools of this nature, this paper presents an overview on the static analysis tools available, both commercial and open-source, for the Scala programming language. This paper discusses in detail about the types of defects that each of these tools can detect, limitations of these tools and also provide potential research direction that can improve the current state of static analyzers for the Scala programming language.