To help developers find hidden errors in their programs, Facebook has released as open source a tool that it uses to debug millions of lines of its own code.

The software, called Infer, could be useful to organizations and individuals building mobile and desktop apps and could use extra help debugging, said Facebook developer Peter O’Hearn, one of the tool’s creators.

Infer is a static program analyzer. Static analyzers don’t test programs by running them. Instead, they mathematically examine the code for all the possible ways it could run, flagging incorrect or unfinished bits.

Infer is particularly well-suited for applications too large to be understood by any one programmer, O’Hearn said. It separates an application into a set of smaller parts so they can be examined more easily. It also remembers which parts of the application it has already analyzed, and doesn’t re-check them unless they have been modified.

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