Finding Concurrency Bugs in Java

Because threads are a core feature of the Java language, the widespread adoption of Java has exposed a much wider audience to concurrency than previous languages have. Concurrent programs are notoriously difficult to write correctly, and many subtle bugs can result from incorrect use of threads and synchronization. Therefore, finding techniques to find concurrency bugs is an important problem. Through development and use of an automatic static analysis tool, we have found a significant number of concurrency bugs in widely used Java applications and libraries. Interestingly, we have found that race conditions abound in concurrent Java programs; underuse of synchronization is the rule rather than the exception. We have also found many examples of other kinds of concurrency errors, suggesting that many Java programmers have fundamental misconceptions about how to write correct multithreaded programs. This paper makes two main contributions. First, it describes simple analysis techniques that are effective at finding concurrency errors in real programs. Second, it provides evidence that threads and concurrency are widely misused in Java, even in programs written by experienced programmers.

[1]  Phillip G. Armour.  The five orders of ignorance , 2000, CACM.

[2]  Michael Burrows,et al.  Eraser: a dynamic data race detector for multithreaded programs , 1997, TOCS.

[3]  Nicholas Sterling,et al.  WARLOCK - A Static Data Race Analysis Tool , 1993, USENIX Winter.

[4]  Yang Meng Tan,et al.  LCLint: a tool for using specifications to check code , 1994, SIGSOFT '94.

[5]  Steven V. Earhart.  UNIX programmer's manual , 1986 .

[6]  Dawson R. Engler,et al.  RacerX: effective, static detection of race conditions and deadlocks , 2003, SOSP '03.

[7]  Murray Hill,et al.  Lint, a C Program Checker , 1978 .

[8]  Dawson R. Engler,et al.  Checking system rules using system-specific, programmer-written compiler extensions , 2000, OSDI.

[9]  John K. Ousterhout,et al.  Why Threads Are A Bad Idea (for most purposes) , 2003 .

[10]  Allison Druin,et al.  The International Children's Digital Library: Description and analysis of first use , 2003, First Monday.

[11]  William R. Bush,et al.  A static analyzer for finding dynamic programming errors , 2000, Softw. Pract. Exp..

[12]  Martin C. Rinard,et al.  ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), November 2002 Ownership Types for Safe Programming: Preventing Data Races and Deadlocks , 2022 .

[13]  Sarita V. Adve,et al.  Shared Memory Consistency Models: A Tutorial , 1996, Computer.

[14]  Mauricio J. Serrano,et al.  Thin locks: featherweight Synchronization for Java , 2004, SIGP.

[15]  David F. Bacon,et al.  Guava: a dialect of Java without data races , 2000, OOPSLA '00.

[16]  Kiyokuni Kawachiya,et al.  Lock reservation: Java locks can mostly do without atomic operations , 2002, OOPSLA '02.

[17]  Armin Biere,et al.  Applying static analysis to large-scale, multi-threaded Java programs , 2001, Proceedings 2001 Australian Software Engineering Conference.

[18]  Cormac Flanagan,et al.  A type and effect system for atomicity , 2003, PLDI.