GoPV: Detecting Blocking Concurrency Bugs Related to Shared-Memory Synchronization in Go

Go is a popular concurrent programming language that employs both message-passing and shared-memory synchronization primitives for interaction between different threads known as goroutines. However, the misuse of the synchronization primitives can easily lead to blocking concurrency bugs, including deadlocks, goroutine leaks. While blocking concurrency bugs related to message passing have received increasing attention, little work focuses on the blocking concurrency bugs caused by the misuse of shared-memory synchronization primitives. In this paper, we present GoPV, a static analyzer and an open-source tool, which performs concurrency analysis and (post-)dominator analysis to determine blocking concurrency bugs by ascertaining whether the synchronization primitives are misused. We evaluate GoPV on eight benchmark programs and 21 large real-world Go projects. The experimental results demonstrate that GoPV not only successfully detects all blocking concurrency bugs related to shared-memory synchronization in the eight benchmark programs, but also discovers 17 such bugs in the 21 large Go applications within 2.78 hours.