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

Torres Lopez, Carmen and Marr, Stefan and Gonzalez Boix, Elisa and Mössenböck, Hanspeter (2018) A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs. In: Ricci, Alessandro and Haller, Philipp, eds. Programming with Actors: State-of-the-Art and research Perspectives. Lect.Notes ComputerState-of-the-Art Surveys, 10789 . Springer. ISBN 978-3-030-00302-9. (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:68802)

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Official URL: https://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783030003012

Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Book section
Uncontrolled keywords:	Actor Model, Concurrency, Bugs, Survey
Divisions:	Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User:	Stefan Marr
Date Deposited:	24 Aug 2018 15:12 UTC
Last Modified:	16 Feb 2021 13:57 UTC
Resource URI:	https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/68802 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Marr, Stefan.

Creator's ORCID:	https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9059-5180
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