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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Programming with Actors - State-of-the-Art and Research Perspectives |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Pages | 155-185 |
| Number of pages | 31 |
| Volume | 10789 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-030-00302-9 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-3-030-00301-2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
| Event | AGERE 2016: The 6th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control - Amsterdam, Netherlands Duration: 30 Oct 2016 → 30 Oct 2016 http://2016.splashcon.org/track/agere2016 |
Publication series
| Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science |
|---|
Workshop
| Workshop | AGERE 2016: The 6th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control |
|---|---|
| Abbreviated title | AGERE 2016 |
| Country/Territory | Netherlands |
| City | Amsterdam |
| Period | 30/10/16 → 30/10/16 |
| Internet address |
Keywords
- Actor model
- Bugs
- Concurrency
- Survey