thr2csp: Toward Transforming Threads into Communicating Sequential Processes

As multicore and heterogeneous multiprocessor platforms replace uniprocessor systems, software programs must be designed with a greater emphasis on concurrency. Threading has become the dominant paradigm of concurrent computation in the most popular programming languages. Large threaded programs are known to be difficult to implement correctly, comprehend, and maintain, while concurrent programs written in process algebraic paradigms of concurrency, such as communicating sequential processes, are known to be easier to analyze. This paper presents our initial work on reverse engineering threaded source code and transforming the code into functionally-equivalent message-passing code. The paper also explores future work needed to convert the message-passing code into communicating sequential processes.

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