Towards Advanced Debugging Support for Actor Languages: Studying Concurrency Bugs in Actor-based Programs

Abstract

With the ubiquity of multicore hardware, concurrent and parallel programming has become a fundamental part of software development. If writing concurrent programs is hard, debugging them is even harder. The actor model is attractive for developing concurrent applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicates through asynchronous message sending and do not share state, thus they avoid common concurrency bugs such as race conditions. However, they are not immune to bugs. This paper presents initial work on a taxonomy of concurrent bugs for actor based applications. Based on this study, we propose debugging tooling to assist the development process of actor-based applications