Static Detection of Deadlocks in Erlang

We address the problem of detecting two different kinds of possible deadlocks in Erlang programs using static analysis. Our analysis is completely automatic, fast and effective in detecting deadlocks while avoiding most false alarms. We have integrated our analysis in dialyzer, a widely used tool for detecting software defects in Erlang programs, and demonstrate its effectiveness on open-source libraries and applications of considerable size. Despite the fact that most of these applications have been used over a long period of time and are reasonably well-tested, our analysis has detected a number of previously unknown deadlocks in their code that may have devastating effects at runtime.