Automated Dynamic Concurrency Analysis for Go

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automatic dynamic tracing tool for Go that captures and analyzes concurrency behavior, aiding debugging of complex concurrent programs with high scalability.

Contribution

It presents a novel enhancement to Go's tracer for efficient whole-program concurrency analysis and debugging, capable of handling thousands of goroutines.

Findings

Effective post-mortem concurrency analysis demonstrated

Scalable to over 2,000 goroutines

Preliminary results show promising debugging assistance

Abstract

The concurrency features of the Go language have proven versatile in the development of a number of concurrency systems. However, correctness methods to address challenges in Go concurrency debugging have not received much attention. In this work, we present an automatic dynamic tracing mechanism that efficiently captures and helps analyze the whole-program concurrency model. Using an enhancement to the built-in tracer package of Go and a framework that collects dynamic traces from application execution, we enable thorough post-mortem analysis for concurrency debugging. Preliminary results about the effectiveness and scalability (up to more than 2K goroutines) of our proposed dynamic tracing for concurrent debugging are presented. We discuss the future direction for exploiting dynamic tracing towards accelerating concurrent bug exposure.