Testing concurrency on the JVM with Lincheck

Concurrent programming can be notoriously complex and error-prone. Programming bugs can arise from a variety of sources, such as operation re-reordering, or incomplete understanding of the memory model. A variety of formal and model checking methods have been developed to address this fundamental difficulty. While technically interesting, existing academic methods are still hard to apply to the large codebases typical of industrial deployments, which limits their practical impact

LNCS

This paper presents Lincheck, a new practical and user-friendly framework for testing concurrent algorithms on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Lincheck provides a simple and declarative way to write concurrent tests: instead of describing how to perform the test, users specify what to test by declaring all the operations to examine; the framework automatically handles the rest. As a result, tests written with Lincheck are concise and easy to understand. The framework automatically generates a set of concurrent scenarios, examines them using stress-testing or bounded model checking, and verifies that the results of each invocation are correct. Notably, if an error is detected via model checking, Lincheck provides an easy-to-follow trace to reproduce it, significantly simplifying the bug investigation. To the best of our knowledge, Lincheck is the first production-ready tool on the JVM that offers such a simple way of writing concurrent tests, without requiring special skills or expertise. We successfully integrated Lincheck in the development process of several large projects, such as Kotlin Coroutines, and identified new bugs in popular concurrency libraries, such as a race in Java’s standard ConcurrentLinkedDeque and a liveliness bug in Java’s AbstractQueuedSynchronizer framework, which is used in most of the synchronization primitives. We believe that Lincheck can significantly improve the quality and productivity of concurrent algorithms research and development and become the state-of-the-art tool for checking their correctness