Tom Davies

Compiler and type-systems team @ WhatsApp

Tom is a member of the compiler and type-systems team at WhatsApp, and has a keen interest in making tooling which scales with teams and their code as they grow.

Tom has previously contributed to Dialyzer by introducing its incremental mode, and has a continued interest in the project.

Outside of work, Tom is a keen snowboarder and DIYer, and is a dog-parent to two border terriers.

Talk:
Scaling Dialyzer

Dialyzer is a powerful tool for finding bugs in Erlang code, and as a codebase grows, it becomes harder for humans to keep track of everything themselves, so we need to increasingly lean on our tooling to get the job done.

In OTP 26, Dialyzer’s incremental mode became widely available, allowing Dialyzer’s performance to scale to larger codebases by avoiding redundant analysis between code changes.

In this talk, I will cover the next steps in scaling Dialyzer’s performance which I have been working on: including finer-grained incrementality, micro-optimisations, ETS performance, and more.

Whilst the talk is primarily about Dialyzer, the performance considerations and optimisations may be of wider interest to other people working on the BEAM.