A Type System for Unstructured Locking that Guarantees Deadlock Freedom without Imposing a Lock Ordering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel type system for concurrent programming that guarantees deadlock freedom without requiring strict lock ordering, thereby enhancing expressiveness and safety in unstructured locking scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a new type system that ensures deadlock freedom in languages with unstructured locking, avoiding the need for lock ordering constraints.

Findings

Type system guarantees deadlock freedom

Supports unstructured locking primitives

Increases programming flexibility

Abstract

Deadlocks occur in concurrent programs as a consequence of cyclic resource acquisition between threads. In this paper we present a novel type system that guarantees deadlock freedom for a language with references, unstructured locking primitives, and locks which are implicitly associated with references. The proposed type system does not impose a strict lock acquisition order and thus increases programming language expressiveness.