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

摘要

The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrentapplications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicatethrough asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thus, they avoid commonconcurrency bugs such as data races. However, they are not immune toconcurrency bugs in general. This paper studies concurrency bugs in actor-basedprograms reported in literature. We define a taxonomy for these bugs.Furthermore, we analyze the bugs to identify the patterns causing them as wellas their observable behavior. Based on our taxonomy, we further analyze theliterature and find that current approaches to static analysis and testingfocus on communication deadlocks and message protocol violations. However, theydo not provide solutions to identify livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. Wepropose a research roadmap of the main debugging techniques that can help tosupport the development of actor-based programs.