GoDetector: Detecting Concurrent Bug in Go

Abstract

Go provides a new concurrency mechanism based on message-passing, which brings a series of new concurrency bugs. The existing tools are highly dependent on model-checking methods in which they take the source program as the input of model-checking tools to detect the potential concurrent bugs. However, these methods can only qualitatively obtain the concurrency of the program but not obtain the exact number of concurrency bugs in the program. Meanwhile, these approaches are not sensitive to dead codes, which are prone to false negatives. Furthermore, few works have been done on detecting WaitGroup-related bugs in Go concurrent programming, which may cause deadlock. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach GoDetector to detect concurrent bugs. GoDetector uses a detecting algorithm and a pushdown automaton to verify the channel-related concurrent bugs and WaitGroup-related concurrent bugs separately. To support the evaluation of the tool, 30 benchmarks are collected from the existing tools. GoDetector reports 2 channel safety errors, 29 deadlocks, and 11 WaitGroup-related errors. Compared with the existing tool Godel, GoDetector has the capacity to report more concurrency bugs and fewer false positives. GoDetector also offers additional support for the detection of WaitGroup variables. The experimental results indicate that GoDecetor is more efficient at detecting the concurrency in regards to accuracy and diversity.