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dart-lang / sdk

The Dart SDK, including the VM, JS and Wasm compilers, analysis, core libraries, and more.
https://dart.dev
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Add Dart Analyzer analytics to understand non-nullsafe Dart usage #52235

Open jacob314 opened 1 year ago

jacob314 commented 1 year ago

Right now we struggle to understand how much non-null safe Dart usage is left and whether the non-null safe Dart usage is maintenance mode usage or active development where users are adding new package dependencies and relying on websites such as pub.dartlang.org.

We currently track the % of all Flutter run commands without sound null safety. This # may overstate the % of Flutter apps under active development using sound null safety as most unsound apps may be in maintenance mode with only minor local tweaks.

What would be more actionable is the number of flutter apps run without sound null safety that are still in active development. Possible analyzer analytics to track this:

  1. Sessions with changes to pubspec.yaml files (specifically adding new dependencies). This would indicate the app is still under active development as new dependencies are being added.
  2. Changes to Dart files. This number may also skew relative to invocations of Flutter run as maintenance mode apps may be run locally much more than they are edited.
bwilkerson commented 1 year ago

It seems to me that any app that is under active development is going to have more results (no matter how they're measured) than apps in maintenance mode. I don't know how we'd counter that skew.

That said, another possibility to consider would be to record the minimum SDK constraint for analyzed packages. That would tell us about adoption of all language features, both null-safety and others in the future.

bwilkerson commented 1 year ago

What's the priority of this work?

jacob314 commented 1 year ago

recording the minimum SDK constraint sounds good. I'd say that is a P2 assuming it is easy to log. Other more complex metrics are probably P3.

parlough commented 9 months ago

Do you see this as necessary at this point in Dart 3+ releases? Or did you mean for these analytics to be released in older versions of the SDK, or for use in understanding the usage of future features?

My understanding is that almost all of the remaining usages of Dart 3+ SDK releases that are still using unsound mode are within Google, since trying to use unsound mode outside is unsupported, inconsistent between tools, and hidden. I'd be surprised if many developers have been doing it rather than sticking to an earlier SDK release.