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Order types: static reasoning about message races in asynchronous message passing concurrency

Authors:

Mehdi Bagherzadeh,

Hridesh RajanAuthors Info & Claims

AGERE 2017: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

Pages 21 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/3141834.3141837

Published: 23 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Asynchronous message passing concurrency with higher level concurrency constructs including activities, asynchronous method invocations and future return values is gaining increased popularity, as an alternative to shared memory concurrency with lower level threads and locks. However, similar to data races in shared memory concurrency, message races in asynchronous message passing concurrency can make a program incorrect and cause bugs that are hard to find and fix. This paper presents order types, a novel type system for static reasoning about message races in asynchronous message passing concurrency. Order types are local, causal and polymorphic types with the following features. First, order types encode both communication and flow behaviors and their happens-before relations. Second, order types are designed for an imperative calculus with concurrent activities, asynchronous method invocations, future return values, wait-by-necessity synchronizations on futures, first-class activities and futures, recursion and dynamic creation of activities. Third, order types are polymorphic and introduce universally quantified type variables to encode unknown values of variables. Fourth, the order type of a module can be inferred modularly using only its implementation and independent of implementations of other modules in the program. Order types complement previous work on static reasoning about races in asynchronous message passing concurrency.

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Cited By

Moradi Moghadam MBagherzadeh MKhatchadourian RBagheri HChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)𝜇Akka: Mutation Testing for Actor Concurrency in Akka using Real-World BugsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616362(262-274)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616362
Fowler SAttard DSowul FGay STrinder P(2023)Special Delivery: Programming with Mailbox TypesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36078327:ICFP(78-107)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607832
Bagherzadeh MFireman NShawesh AKhatchadourian R(2020)Actor concurrency bugs: a comprehensive study on symptoms, root causes, API usages, and differencesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282824:OOPSLA(1-32)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428282
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Order types: static reasoning about message races in asynchronous message passing concurrency
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Formal software verification
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages

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cover image ACM Conferences

AGERE 2017: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

October 2017

57 pages

ISBN:9781450355162

DOI:10.1145/3141834

General Chairs:
Joeri De Koster,
Federico Bergenti

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

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Published: 23 October 2017

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SPLASH '17: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 23, 2017

BC, Vancouver, Canada

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Cited By

Moradi Moghadam MBagherzadeh MKhatchadourian RBagheri HChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)𝜇Akka: Mutation Testing for Actor Concurrency in Akka using Real-World BugsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616362(262-274)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616362
Fowler SAttard DSowul FGay STrinder P(2023)Special Delivery: Programming with Mailbox TypesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36078327:ICFP(78-107)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607832
Bagherzadeh MFireman NShawesh AKhatchadourian R(2020)Actor concurrency bugs: a comprehensive study on symptoms, root causes, API usages, and differencesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282824:OOPSLA(1-32)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428282
Khatchadourian RTang YBagherzadeh MRay B(2020)An Empirical Study on the Use and Misuse of Java 8 StreamsFundamental Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-45234-6_5(97-118)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45234-6_5
Gordon CBergenti FCastegren EDe Koster JFranco J(2019)Modal assertions for actor correctnessProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control10.1145/3358499.3361221(11-20)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3358499.3361221
Khatchadourian RTang YBagherzadeh MAhmed SAtlee JBultan TWhittle J(2019)Safe automated refactoring for intelligent parallelization of Java 8 streamsProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2019.00072(619-630)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00072
Ahmed SBagherzadeh MOivo MMéndez DMockus A(2018)What do concurrency developers ask about?Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3239235.3239524(1-10)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3239235.3239524

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