Adds table field checks for #39

[arichard4]

The basic design here:

• Start tracking on a table assignment of the form $var = {x, y, z}. This automatically excludes anything with a metatable.
• End tracking of all tracked vars on any scope changes, from control flow (for, while, if, etc) or from function calls. This automatically stops tracking on the usage of functions like pairs/ipairs/table.insert/table.remove, so we don't need any special case handling for them.
• Track which variables are a reference to which tables. Not sure how useful this actually is; if you'd prefer, I can just flatly stop tracking the table in that case.
• Track which table fields have been set or have been accessed. Unknown sets/accesses are tracked as potentially setting/accessing every table field.
• On a table field access, warn if that field has been set. If the field access key is unknown (a variable or a complex type like "1 + 1"), only warn if no fields at all have been set. If an unknown set has occurred, don't warn.
• On a table field set, check if it's overwriting a previous set that hasn't possibly been accessed.
• When the table goes out of scope, check if there are any sets that have no accesses, accounting for unknown key accesses.

If you check my fork of luacheck, on the table_fields branch, I wrote a far more complicated version last November that tried to handle control flow (except for break statements) and function calls as well. Unfortunately that got unreviewably complicated; I may submit bits of that in later reviews, but I think that this version is more comprehensible to start with.

[UncombedCoconut]

The branched luacheck remains very fast on a ~100K line code base, with no false positives. No true positives either, and it looks like this initial level of caution is pretty limiting. For example, it's not allowed to catch problems here because print is a function:

local x = {}
print(x.oops)

So it'd be interesting to see if other projects hit these cautious warnings, and (if the implementation is well received) how some bits which extend the tracking boundaries look.

[arichard4]

I’ve run it across 12 largeish lua GitHub projects; it found issues in 3.

sile-typesetter/sile#1286

This version catches the typo’d field name, but not the duplicate assignment.

It also finds non-functionality-affecting minor issues in two other codebases:

In Kong/Kong, there are four places where env.plugins is checked on an empty env tables, eg line 20 here: https://github.com/Kong/kong/blob/911385466571e4f72999fa43419daafae08159d0/spec/02-integration/03-db/11-db_transformations_spec.lua

In LunarVim, some of the colors (red2, orange, gray3) are unused here: https://github.com/LunarVim/onedarker.nvim/blob/master/lua/lualine/themes/onedarker.lua

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Making analysis continue through function calls involves a lot of code and cases, but is conceptually straightforward- we need to track which variables are externally accessible; which are passed to the function directly; and add special cases for builtins we care about like table.insert.

Adding support for continuing analysis through control flow is too complicated to be feasible without a different setup- this is currently looping over the linearized code from linearize.lua, which adapts poorly to non-linear control flow.

[arichard4]

I don't usually use Github, so I'm not familiar with the standard workflow- would it be standard for me to add the (conceptually separate/additional) support for continued execution through function calls to this PR, open a separate PR (on top of this branch or something? not sure how) or something else?

[alerque]

If it is conceptually a different feature but dependent on this one my suggestion is to start a new branch based on this one and open a new PR in draft mode. It will show all the commits in this branch too until this PR is merged, then after this is merged it will show just the new commits in that branch and can be taken out of draft mode for review. There are different workflows to handle this but that's the one I usually reach for. If early review of the unique commits is important you can open a PR merging into this branch, then change the target later, but I don't feel that is necessary for this case.

[alerque]

I'm sorry I never got a chance to give this a good test drive. I'm considering whether I should move ahead with a new release soon to get the new builtins out the door or hang back for a bit and try to work out whether this is ready to go in. What's your take on how ready this is?

[alerque]

I tried merging master into this locally. The merge conflicts are only in the total number of warnings/errors/files output in some tests, so that's a no-brainer to fix. However the tests don't seem to to output results at all, a half dozen or so actually crash with Lua errors for output, not lint results.