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Types for safe locking: Static race detection for Java

Authors:

Cormac Flanagan,

Stephen N. FreundAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Volume 28, Issue 2

Pages 207 - 255

https://doi.org/10.1145/1119479.1119480

Published: 01 March 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This article presents a static race-detection analysis for multithreaded shared-memory programs, focusing on the Java programming language. The analysis is based on a type system that captures many common synchronization patterns. It supports classes with internal synchronization, classes that require client-side synchronization, and thread-local classes. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the type system, we have implemented it in a checker and applied it to over 40,000 lines of hand-annotated Java code. We found a number of race conditions in the standard Java libraries and other test programs. The checker required fewer than 20 additional type annotations per 1,000 lines of code. This article also describes two improvements that facilitate checking much larger programs: an algorithm for annotation inference and a user interface that clarifies warnings generated by the checker. These extensions have enabled us to use the checker for identifying race conditions in large-scale software systems with up to 500,000 lines of code.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems Volume 28, Issue 2

March 2006

182 pages

ISSN:0164-0925

EISSN:1558-4593

DOI:10.1145/1119479

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Copyright © 2006 ACM.

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Published: 01 March 2006

Published in TOPLAS Volume 28, Issue 2

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