The Java Memory Model - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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• Jaroslav Sevcik
• Friday 13 July 2007, 14:00-15:00
• FW11.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Tom Ridge.

We describe our formalisation of the data race free (DRF) guarantee provided by Java, as captured by the semi-formal Java Memory Model (JMM) research paper (Manson et al, 2005) and published in the Java Language Specification. The DRF guarantee says that all data race free programs can only have sequentially consistent behaviours. Such behaviours can be understood intuitively by programmers. The formalisation revealed that not all of the anticipated conditions in the JMM definition were actually necessary for the DRF guarantee. This allows us to suggest a quick fix to a serious bug discovered by Cenciarelli et al (2007) without invalidating the DRF guarantee. We will also overview other inconsistencies and bugs that we have found in the JMM .

This talk is part of the Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory) series.

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