The problem

The comparison contract states that sgn(compare(x, y)) == -sgn(compare(y, x)). (An immediate corollary is that compare(x, x) == 0.) This comparison implementation either a) cannot return 0, b) cannot return a negative value but may return a positive value, or c) cannot return a positive value but may return a negative value.

The results of violating this contract can include TreeSet.contains never returning true or Collections.sort failing with an IllegalArgumentException arbitrarily.

In the long term, essentially all Comparators should be rewritten to use the Java 8 Comparator factory methods, but our automated migration tools will, of course, only work for correctly implemented Comparators.

Suppression

Suppress false positives by adding the suppression annotation @SuppressWarnings("ComparisonContractViolated") to the enclosing element.