RSS Meetups are monthly gatherings of LASIGE members with research interests mainly in Software Architecture, Verification, Testing, Programming Languages, Type Systems, Logic, Concurrency, and Formal Methods.

Abstract: The Go programming language is gaining momentum as a tool for developing concurrent software, privileging message-passing as the favoured abstraction for concurrency interaction. Message-passing is not immune to the usual concurrency errors: programs may deadlock since the language run-time offers only basic support for deadlock detection with no safety guarantees at compile-time (apart from the usual data type-safety). There is a need for more general deadlock resolution strategies in a Go message-passing setting that go beyond prevention and avoidance: existing solutions detect numerous deadlocks but limit their resolution to a small set of specific deadlock patterns. In this paper, we develop an algorithm that takes an abstraction of the communication behaviour of a Go program containing all the channel communication necessary for progress, detects possible deadlocks, and then suggests replacement code to the erroneous code snippet causing the deadlock. Building on previous work, we deal with real world situations that go beyond the state-of-the-art, offering solutions for deadlock detection and fixing that other approaches do not deal with.