A Bazel story of how we integrated a proprietary static analysis tool for fast, incremental analysis with Bazel.

Phaskell's platform  covers topics related to software development, technology trends, and coding tutorials. Through articles, tutorials, and personal anecdotes, Phaskell offers insights into programming languages, development frameworks, and best practices in software engineering. Readers can learn about software design principles, development methodologies, and emerging technologies to enhance their coding skills and build high-quality software applications.

Planet Haskell

Tweag integrated Coverity static analysis with Bazel to enable cacheable, incremental analysis suitable for merge request pipelines. The solution involved creating a custom Bazel toolchain that wraps cov-translate invocations, producing granular SQLite databases (emit-dbs) that can be cached and merged. Key challenges included ensuring reproducibility by normalizing volatile data in databases (timestamps, PIDs, absolute paths) and optimizing performance through compression and selective remote execution. The result reduced analysis time from 12+ hours in nightly builds to ~22 minutes in merge requests, with most time spent on database merging and targeted analysis using --tu-pattern for changed files.

Integrating Coverity static analysis with Bazel