I recently diagnosed the root cause of a concurrency bug, CR6822370,
and thought it sufficiently interesting to share the details. (CR 6822370 actually represents a
cluster of bugs that are now thought to be related by a common underlying issue).
Briefly, we have a lost wakeup bug in the native C++ Parker::park() platform-specific
infrastructure code that implements java.util.concurrent.LockSupport.park().
The lost wakeup arises from a race that itself arises because of architectural
reordering that in turn occurs because of missing memory barrier instructions.
The lost wakeup may manifest as various 'hangs' or instances of progress failure.
Program performance is always a concern, even in this era of high-performance hardware. This article, the first in a two-part series, guides you around the many pitfalls associated with benchmarking Java code. Part 2 covers the statistics of benchmarking and offers a framework for performing Java benchmarking. Because almost all new languages are virtual machine-based, the general principles the article describes have broad significance for the programming community at large.
A. Wöß, C. Wirth, D. Bonetta, C. Seaton, C. Humer, and H. Mössenböck. Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools, page 133--144. ACM, (2014)
M. Braux, and J. Noyé. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-based Program Manipulation, page 2--11. ACM, (1999)
M. De Wael, S. Marr, and T. Van Cutsem. Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools, page 39--50. (September 2014)(acceptance rate 39%).
X. Yang, S. Blackburn, D. Frampton, J. Sartor, and K. McKinley. Proceedings of the 2011 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications, page 307--324. ACM, (2011)
A. Shali, and W. Cook. Proceedings of the 2011 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications, page 375--390. ACM, (2011)
H. Masuhara, and A. Yonezawa. International Colloquium on Partial Evaluation and Program Transformation (PE Day'99), page 83--102. Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, (November 1999)
M. Golm, and J. Kleinöder. Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, volume 1616 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, (1999)
N. Beckman, D. Kim, and J. Aldrich. ECOOP 2011 – Object-Oriented Programming, volume 6813 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, (2011)