ThreadSanitizer - Data race detection in practice

Data races are a particularly unpleasant kind of threading bugs. They are hard to find and reproduce – you may not observe a bug during the entire testing cycle and will only see it in production as rare unexplainable failures. This pa-per presents ThreadSanitizer – a dynamic detector of data races. We describe the hybrid algorithm (based on happens-before and locksets) used in the detector. We introduce what we call dynamic annotations – a sort of race detec-tion API that allows a user to inform the detector about any tricky synchronization in the user program. Various practical aspects of using ThreadSanitizer for testing multi-threaded C++ code at Google are also discussed