Wrapper libraries (release and/or support and/or evangelize)

[kevinb9n]

A variety of APIs read annotations from program elements: reflection, the javac API, etc.

JSpecify-aware wrapper libraries for these could do a lot to further JSpecify's goals. Essentially, wherever our specifications define that scenarios X and Y are isomorphic, we'd like APIs that make X and Y indistinguishable. Examples:

• automatically follow @Implies; say that the annotation is present whether it is directly or indirectly (Declaring that one annotation aliases or specializes another (@Implies) [working decision: no] #35)
• check parent scopes; say an annotation is present on X if it is present on X or any enclosing scope (Common pattern for a set of exclusive scope-annotations (e.g. null-marked and null-unmarked) #109)
• abstract over overlay/stub files, providing the right answer no matter where the annotation came from

Of course this has nothing to do with preventing anyone from querying at the lower level / more literally. (For example you'd need to do this to report that one of our annotations was used redundantly.)

These would help people adopt our specs and overall lead to more spec-compliance in the world. I also like that the mere existence of these libraries gives users some very simple and concrete ways to understand what our annotations even mean.

(This issue should eventually be split up.)

[jbduncan]

I like the sound of this! It reminds me of how JUnit 5 has APIs that third-party JUnit extensions can use to make writing extensions easier, like finding annotations easily.