2026 EuroLLVM - Adding Nullability Checking and Annotations to Many Millions of Lines of Code

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2026 EuroLLVM Developers' Meeting

https://llvm.org/devmtg/2026-04/

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Title: Adding Nullability Checking and Annotations to Many Millions of Lines of Code

Speaker: Jan Voung

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Slides: https://llvm.org/devmtg/2026-04/slides/technical_talk/technical_talk_voung.pdf

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At Google, our team has been working on reducing null pointer dereference crashes in a huge and diverse C++ codebase by: (a) adopting the Clang nullability annotations and (b) implementing a flow-sensitive intra-procedural dataflow analysis in ClangTidy that verifies that code adheres to the contracts of the annotations. However, to get the most coverage, we need to introduce the annotations to millions of lines of code. To assist with that, we've developed an inter-TU annotation inference tool, and added inferred annotations through a "large-scale change". This talk introduces how the ClangTidy verification and inference tools work, but also discusses the practical experience and the challenges we faced attempting to infer the annotations in "legacy" C++.

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