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

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Programming with Actors

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10789))

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Akka.io: Testing Actor Systems, Lightbend Inc., access date: 8 February 2017, http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/scala/testing.html.

  2. 2.

    Web Workers, W3C, access date: 14 February 2017, https://www.w3.org/TR/workers/.

  3. 3.

    http://blog.chromium.org/2012/04/debugging-web-workers-with-chrome.html.

  4. 4.

    Debugger, Ericsson AB, access date: 14 February 2017, http://erlang.org/doc/apps/debugger/debugger_chapter.html.

  5. 5.

    Asynchronous Debugger, ScalaIDE, access date: 14 February 2017, http://scala-ide.org/docs/current-user-doc/features/async-debugger/index.html.

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Acknowledgments

This research is funded by a collaboration grant of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) with the project I2491-N31 and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO Belgium) with the project number G004816N.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussel, Belgium

    Carmen Torres Lopez & Elisa Gonzalez Boix

  2. Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Hanspeter Mössenböck

  3. University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Stefan Marr

Authors
  1. Carmen Torres Lopez
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  2. Stefan Marr
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  3. Elisa Gonzalez Boix
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  4. Hanspeter Mössenböck
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elisa Gonzalez Boix .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy

    Alessandro Ricci

  2. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Philipp Haller

Appendix

Appendix

Table 3. Catalog of bugs found in actor-based programs
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Torres Lopez, C., Marr, S., Gonzalez Boix, E., Mössenböck, H. (2018). A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs. In: Ricci, A., Haller, P. (eds) Programming with Actors. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10789. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_6

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