Automated verification of concurrent go programs via bounded model checking

Abstract

The Go programming language offers a wide range of primitives to coordinate lightweight threads, e.g., channels, waitgroups, and mutexes—all of which may cause concurrency bugs. Static checkers that guarantee the absence of bugs are essential to help programmers avoid these costly errors before their code is executed. However existing tools either miss too many bugs or cannot handle large programs, and do not support programs that rely on statically unknown parameters that affect their concurrent structure (e.g., number of threads). To address these limitations, we propose a static checker for Go programs which relies on performing bounded model checking of their concurrent behaviours. In contrast to previous works, our approach deals with large codebases, supports programs that have statically unknown parameters, and is extensible to additional concurrency primitives. Our work includes a detailed presentation of the extraction algorithm from Go programs to models, an algorithm to automatically check programs with statically unknown parameters, and a large scale evaluation of our approach. The latter shows that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on 220 synthetic programs and 78 buggy programs adapted from existing codebases.