Automated Verification of Concurrent Go Programs via Bounded Model Checking

The Go programming language offers a wide range of primitives to coordinate lightweight threads, e.g., channels, waitgroups, and mutexes — all of which may cause concurrency bugs. Static checkers that guarantee the absence of bugs are essential to help programmers avoid these costly errors before their code is executed. However existing tools either miss too many bugs or cannot handle large programs, and do not sup- port programs that rely on statically unknown parameters that affect their concurrent structure (e.g., number of threads). To address these limitations, we propose a static checker for Go programs which relies on performing bounded model checking of their concurrent behaviours. In contrast to previous works, our approach deals with large codebases, sup- ports programs that have statically unknown parameters, and is extensible to additional concurrency primitives. Our work includes a detailed presentation of the extraction algorithm from Go programs to models, an algorithm to automatically check programs with statically unknown parameters, and a large scale evaluation of our approach. The latter shows that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on 220 synthetic programs and 78 buggy programs adapted from existing codebases

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF CONCURRENT FEATURE USAGE IN GO

The Go language includes support for running functions or methods concurrently as goroutines, which are lightweight threads managed directly by the Go language runtime. Go is probably best known for the use of a channel-based, message-passing concurrency mechanism, based on Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), for inter-thread communication. However, Go also includes support for traditional concurrency features, such as mutexes and condition variables, that are commonly used in other languages. In this paper, we analyze the use of these traditional concurrency features, using a corpus of Go programs used in earlier work to study the use of message-passing concurrency features in Go. The goal of this work is to better support developers in using traditional concurrency features, or a combination of traditional and message-passing features, in Go