Lambda the Ultimate

(This group and the diaspora seems to be doing all sorts of interesting things. I got around to this by wondering about static analysis of JavaScript wrt performance.)

As a developer
Who ends up on concurrent systems
I would like to be able to debug them.
(Even before I run them.)

Persuasive Prediction of Concurrency Access Anomalies
Jeff Huang, Charles Zhang
Department of Computer Science and Engineering The Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology
Predictive analysis is a powerful technique that exposes concurrency bugs in un-exercised program executions. However, current predictive analysis approaches lack the persuasiveness property as they offer little assistance in helping programmers fully understand the execution history that triggers the predicted bugs. We present a persuasive bug prediction technique as well as a prototype tool, PECAN , for detecting general access anomalies (AAs) in concurrent programs. The main characteristic of PECAN is that, in addition to predict AAs in a more general way, it gener- ates ‚bug hatching clips‚ that deterministically instruct the input program to exercise the predicted AAs. The key in- gredient of PECAN is an efficient offline schedule generation algorithm, with proof of the soundness, that guarantees to generate a feasible schedule for every real AA in programs that use locks in a nested way. We evaluate PECAN using twenty-two multi-threaded subjects including six large concurrent systems, and our experiments demonstrate that PECAN is able to effectively predict and deterministically expose real AAs. Several serious and previously unknown bugs in large open source concurrent systems were also re- vealed in our experiments

(sotto voice: I guess there's something to be said for using just utterly unprincipled, unrestricted, unconstrained, awful things like rampant concurrency, and Java, JavaScript, et. al., because it gives the Really Smart People in the world something to attack and improve and show off around. I mean, if we all had the luxury of Doing Things Right from the get-go I feel like lots of valuable insights (with wider application than their originating research) would never have been discovered or created.)