Detecting Oxbow Code in Erlang Codebases with the Highest Degree of Certainty

TL;DR

This paper introduces a static analysis tool for Erlang that accurately detects oxbow dead code, helping improve code quality and maintainability in large, long-lived projects.

Contribution

It formulates specific rules for identifying oxbow code in Erlang and provides an open-source static analyzer implementing these rules.

Findings

High accuracy detection of oxbow code

Open-source tool available for Erlang developers

Improves project maintainability by removing dead code

Abstract

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 paper, 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.