A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs

The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated citation

The shared-memory interferences of Erlang/OTP built-ins

Erlang is a concurrent functional language based on the actor modelof concurrency. In the purest form of this model, actors are realizedby processes that do not share memory and communicate witheach other exclusively via message passing. Erlang comes quiteclose to this model, as message passing is the primary form of interprocesscommunication and each process has its own memoryarea that is managed by the process itself. For this reason, Erlangis often referred to as implementing “shared nothing” concurrency.Although this is a convenient abstraction, in reality Erlang’s mainimplementation, the Erlang/OTP system, comes with a large numberof built-in operations that access memory which is shared byprocesses. In this paper, we categorize these built-ins, and characterizethe interferences between them that can result in observabledifferences of program behaviour when these built-ins are usedin a concurrent setting. The paper is complemented by a publiclyavailable suite of more than one hundred small Erlang programsthat demonstrate the racing behaviour of these built-ins.UPMAR