Abstract
We address the problem of detecting some commonly occurring kinds of race conditions in Erlang programs using static analysis. Our analysis is completely automatic, fast and scalable, and avoids false alarms by taking language characteristics into account. We have integrated our analysis in dialyzer, a commonly used tool for detecting software defects in Erlang programs which is part of Erlang/OTP, and evaluate its effectiveness and performance on a suite of widely used industrial and open source programs of considerable size. The analysis has detected a significant number of previously unknown race conditions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Armstrong, J.: Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. The Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh (2007)
Lamport, L.: Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Communications of the ACM 21(7), 558–565 (1978)
Cronqvist, M.: Troubleshooting a large Erlang system. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Erlang, pp. 11–15. ACM, New York (2004)
Lindahl, T., Sagonas, K.: Detecting software defects in telecom applications through lightweight static analysis: A war story. In: Chin, W.-N. (ed.) APLAS 2004. LNCS, vol. 3302, pp. 91–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Sagonas, K.: Experience from develo** the Dialyzer: A static analysis tool detecting defects in Erlang applications. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on the Evaluation of Software Defect Detection Tools (2005)
Lindahl, T., Sagonas, K.: Practical type inference based on success ty**s. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming, pp. 167–178. ACM, New York (2006)
Nagy, T., Nagyné VÃg, A.: Erlang testing and tools survey. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Erlang, pp. 21–28. ACM, New York (2008)
Mattsson, H., Nilsson, H., Wikström, C.: Mnesia - a distributed robust DBMS for telecommunications applications. In: Gupta, G. (ed.) PADL 1999. LNCS, vol. 1551, pp. 152–163. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Carlsson, R.: An introduction to Core Erlang. In: Proceedings of the PLI 2001 Workshop on Erlang (2001)
Carlsson, R., Sagonas, K., Wilhelmsson, J.: Message analysis for concurrent programs using message passing. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 28(4), 715–746 (2006)
Dinning, A., Schonberg, E.: Detecting access anomalies in programs with critical sections. In: Proceedings of the ACM/ONR Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Debugging, pp. 85–96. ACM, New York (1991)
Savage, S., Burrows, M., Nelson, G., Sobalvarro, P., Anderson, T.: Eraser: A dynamic data race detector for multithreaded programs. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 27–37. ACM, New York (1997)
O’Callahan, R., Choi, J.D.: Hybrid dynamic data race detection. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, pp. 167–178. ACM, New York (2003)
Beckman, N.E.: A survey of methods for preventing race conditions (2006)
Sterling, N.: Warlock: A static data race analysis tool. In: Proceedings of the Usenix Winter Technical Conference, pp. 97–106 (1993)
Engler, D., Ashcraft, K.: RacerX: Effective, static detection of race conditions and deadlocks. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 237–252. ACM, New York (2003)
Choi, J.D., Lee, K., Loginov, A., O’Callahan, R., Sarkar, V., Shidharan, M.: Efficient and precise datarace detection for multithreaded object oriented programs. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pp. 258–269. ACM, New York (2002)
Naik, M., Aiken, A., Whaley, J.: Effective static race detection for Java. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pp. 308–319. ACM, New York (2006)
Voung, J.W., Jahla, R., Lerner, S.: Relay: static race detection of million of lines of code. In: Proceedings of the 6th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 205–214. ACM, New York (2007)
Mathworks: Code verification and run-time error detection through abstract interpretation. White paper (2004)
Claessen, K., Pałka, M., Smallbone, N., Hughes, J., Svensson, H., Arts, T., Wiger, U.: Finding race conditions in Erlang with QuickCheck and PULSE. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming. ACM, New York (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Christakis, M., Sagonas, K. (2010). Static Detection of Race Conditions in Erlang. In: Carro, M., Peña, R. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5937. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11503-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11503-5_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11502-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11503-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)