Finding Stale-Value Errors In Concurrent Programs

Concurrent programs can suffer from many types of errors, not just the well-studied problems of deadlocks and simple race conditions on variables. This paper addresses a kind of race condition that arises from reading a variable whose value is possibly out of date. The paper introduces a simple technique for detecting such stale values, and reports on the encouraging experience with a compile-time checker that uses the technique. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.