Static Application-Level Race Detection in STM Haskell using Contracts

Writing concurrent programs is a hard task, even when using high-level synchronization primitives such as transactional memories together with a functional language with well-controlled side-effects such as Haskell, because the interferences generated by the processes to each other can occur at different levels and in a very subtle way. The problem occurs when a thread leaves or exposes the shared data in an inconsistent state with respect to the application logic or the real meaning of the data. In this paper, we propose to associate contracts to transactions and we define a program transformation that makes it possible to extend static contract checking in the context of STM Haskell. As a result, we are able to check statically that each transaction of a STM Haskell program handles the shared data in a such way that a given consistency property, expressed in the form of a user-defined boolean function, is preserved. This ensures that bad interference will not occur during the execution of the concurrent program.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2013, arXiv:1312.2218. [email protected]; [email protected]

Program Analysis to Support Concurrent Programming in Declarative Language

In recent years, manufacturers of processors are focusing on parallel architectures in order to increase performance. This shift in hardware evolution is provoking a fundamental turn towards concurrency in software development. Unfortunately, developing concurrent programs which are correct and efficient is hard, as the underlying programming model is much more complex than it is for simple sequential programs. The goal of this research is to study and to develop program analysis to support and improve concurrent software development in declarative languages. The characteristics of these languages offer opportunities, as they are good candidates for building concurrent applications while their simple and uniform data representation, together with a small and formally defined semantics makes them well-adapted to automatic program analysis techniques. In our work, we focus primarily on developing static analysis techniques for detecting race conditions at the application level in Mercury and Prolog programs. A further step is to derive (semi-) automatically the location and the granularity of the critical sections using a data-centric approach