The shared-memory interferences of Erlang/OTP built-ins

Erlang is a concurrent functional language based on the actor modelof concurrency. In the purest form of this model, actors are realizedby processes that do not share memory and communicate witheach other exclusively via message passing. Erlang comes quiteclose to this model, as message passing is the primary form of interprocesscommunication and each process has its own memoryarea that is managed by the process itself. For this reason, Erlangis often referred to as implementing “shared nothing” concurrency.Although this is a convenient abstraction, in reality Erlang’s mainimplementation, the Erlang/OTP system, comes with a large numberof built-in operations that access memory which is shared byprocesses. In this paper, we categorize these built-ins, and characterizethe interferences between them that can result in observabledifferences of program behaviour when these built-ins are usedin a concurrent setting. The paper is complemented by a publiclyavailable suite of more than one hundred small Erlang programsthat demonstrate the racing behaviour of these built-ins.UPMAR