Fast error detection with hybrid analyses of future accesses

Abstract

Systematic state space traversal is a popular approach for detecting errors in multithreaded programs. Nevertheless, it is very expensive because any non-trivial program exhibits a huge number of possible interleavings. Some kind of guided and bounded search is often used to achieve good performance. We present two heuristics that are based on a hybrid static-dynamic analysis that can identify possible accesses to shared objects. One heuristic changes the order in which transitions are explored, and the second heuristic prunes selected transitions. Results of experiments on several Java programs, which we performed using our prototype implementation in Java Pathfinder, show that the hybrid analysis together with heuristics significantly improves the performance of error detection.