GoAT: Automated Concurrency Analysis and Debugging Tool for Go

The use of increasing levels of parallelism and concurrency in the system design-especially in a feature-rich language such as Go-demands effective concurrency debugging techniques that are easy to deploy in practice. We present GoAT, a combined static and dynamic concurrency testing and analysis tool that facilitates the process of debugging for real-world programs. Key ideas in GoAT include 1) automated dynamic tracing to capture the behavior of concurrency primitives, 2) systematic schedule space exploration to accelerate the bug occurrence and 3) deadlock detection with supplementary visualizations and reports. We also propose a set of coverage requirements that characterize the dynamic behavior of concurrency primitives and provide metrics to measure the quality of tests. Evaluation of GoAT on 68 curated real-world bug scenarios demonstrates that GoAT is significantly effective in detecting rare bugs, and its schedule perturbation method based on schedule yielding detects these bugs with less than three yields. These results together with the ease of deploying GoAT on real-world Go programs hold significant promise in the field-debugging of Go programs.