-Xlint:unchecked and -Werror for Java projects with Gradle

I was recently working in a codebase where there were chunks of Java code that used generic interfaces from the Apache Commons Collections project as well as java.util Collections in a type unsafe way, even though the interfaces/classes that were being used supported generics.

Our gradle build was emitting the following warning:

:compileJavaNote: Some input files use unchecked or unsafe operations.
Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details.

This warning should be an error in my books. It’s possible to get this behaviour by adding the following to your build.gradle file:

tasks.withType(JavaCompile) {
  options.compilerArgs << "-Xlint:unchecked" << "-Werror"
}

This way, when our code is built everyone is aware when they’re using unsafe operations, and can either fix the issue or supress the warning with @SupressWarnings("unchecked") if it’s intentional.