Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Wednesday 7 September 2005

Blast From The Past

A few years ago, while at IBM, I did some work on dynamic data race detection for Java, in conjunction with some colleagues at the Watson lab (hi Manu, Jong, Vivek, Keunwoo, Alexey!). It culminated in a "hybrid race detector" that combined two previously distinct methods --- lockset and happens-before in a nice way. The work was published in PPoPP 2003.

I'm pleased to see that some people at Microsoft Research have picked up the idea and extended it to analyse CLR programs. It's great that people are carrying on with this line of work --- it feels good to have your ideas built upon. (Although many of the extensions they describe in the paper were actually present in our detector --- I probably didn't get around to writing about them in our paper.)