SRC Technical Note 2002-004

"Finding stale-value errors in concurrent programs" Michael Burrows and K. Rustan M. Leino Note #2002-004, May 14, 2002. 15 pages Concurrent programs can suffer from many types of errors, not just the well-studied problems of deadlocks and simple race conditions on variables. This paper addresses a kind of race condition that arises from reading a variable whose value is possibly out-of-date. The paper introduces a simple technique for detecting such stale values, and reports on the encouraging experience with a compile-time checker that uses the technique.

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