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

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. Thus, they avoid common concurrency bugs such as data races. However, they are not immune to concurrency bugs in general. This paper studies concurrency bugs in actor-based programs reported in literature. We define a taxonomy for these bugs. Furthermore, we analyze the bugs to identify the patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on our 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. We propose a research roadmap of the main debugging techniques that can help to support the development of actor-based programs.