An automatic technique for static deadlock prevention

Abstract

Deadlocks remain one of the biggest threats to concurrent programming. Usually, the best programmers can expect is dynamic deadlock detection, which is only a palliative. Object-oriented programs, with their rich reference structure and the resulting presence of aliasing, raise additional problems. The technique developed in this paper relies on the “alias calculus” to offer a completely static and completely automatic analysis of concurrent object-oriented programs. The discussion illustrates the technique by applying it to two versions of the “dining philosophers” program, of which it proves that the first is deadlock-free and the second deadlock-prone.