Show HN: Java Bullshifier

Hi, Alex from OverOps here. We&#x27;ve created the &quot;Bullshifier&quot; internally to stress test edge cases with our own monitoring tool (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.overops.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.overops.com</a>).<p>Whenever an exception or a logged error &#x2F; warning happens in production, it shows you the complete source code leading to it, and the full variable state across the entire call stack.<p>Using Java Bullshifier, we&#x27;re able to generate random applications with call stacks that can go thousands of frames deep and other quirky behaviors. This helps us make sure the overhead is unnoticed, even in the most extreme cases.<p>Would be happy to answer any questions.

At first I thought this another one of the several Java shaming projects that have been posted in the past on HN (usually in regards to the ridiculous class names of some projects ... aka Spring).<p>But this project actually has some serious utility particularly for byte code manipulators are just alternative compilers like AspectJ. Particularly AspectJ as I have seen it fail on things that neither the Eclipse compiler (JDT) or Open JDK fail on.

I&#x27;m glad to learn that entire businesses exist thanks to the fact that Java has overly verbose exception outputs which are designed to hide the information you are seeking between 200 lines of call stack prints.

We have folks on-site doing just this, but thanks for the thought!

Do you have a De-bullshifier for existing Java codebases?

If you use the right random word combinations for the class name generation, and the code actually does something, this may be near-indistinguishable from a real Java codebase.

In fact, it is a kind of common practice to generate tons of code. For C language, we have Csmith[1]. It is used to find bugs in llvm and GCC.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;embed.cs.utah.edu&#x2F;csmith&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;embed.cs.utah.edu&#x2F;csmith&#x2F;</a>

Obligatory reference to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;EnterpriseQualityCoding&#x2F;FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;EnterpriseQualityCoding&#x2F;FizzBuzzEnterpris...</a>

I wonder if you could use genetic algorithms on codebases like these to make them do something useful.

Wonder if people will use this to post bullshified apps to Github to impress potential employers

What does the generated code actually <i>do</i> when run, besides heavily exercising the JVM? Does it eventually print &quot;Hello world&quot; or something?

It was about time somebody creates something like this. I do have a complain, classes are named random. If you used a tool that generates human like names, it would still be random but looked much better.<p>I will see to create a similar rails tool. I intend to test just stress of people who will look at the code and try to understand what it does.

Nice, but this should be refactored to generate microservices.

Does this remind me legendary paper generator SCIgen... Good to know as a CS teacher ;-)

Neat idea! As a mostly-Java coder (by choice), I love both the approach to testing your own tool as well as the slight side blow into the Java community regarding long stack traces full of framework-contributed delegation classes and virtual proxies.<p>But...not more than 20k classes? That doesn&#x27;t really count as &quot;massive Java application&quot; these days, more like an average-sized enterprise app when including all its dependencies. You would at least triple that to reach &quot;massive&quot; scale ;-)

Kind of off topic, but this reminds me of my internship this summer. What sucks about Spring is the horrible error messages. If there is something wrong in the XML configuration, or dependency configuration, it doesn&#x27;t actually tell you that. Instead, it shows a deep stack trace with some strange exception that doesn&#x27;t relate to the problem at all.

Actually this could be a good platform for generating licensing algorithms that would be included in commercial software. This level of obfuscation would really be hard to crack by reverse engineers that produce cracks&#x2F;keygens.

Features: Generates TONS OF CODE!!<p>I love it.