Data races are a common kind of concurrency bug in multithreaded applications. A data race can be defined as two threads accessing a shared memory location concurrently and at least one of the accesses is a write. Data races are notoriously difficult to find and reproduce because they often happen under very specific circumstances. Therefore, you could have a successful pass of the tests most of the time but some test fails once in a while with some mysterious error message far from the root cause of the data race.
Despite all the effort on solving this problem, it remains a challenge in practice to detect data races effectively and efficiently. RV-Predict aims to change this undesired situation. In this blog post, we will summarize some of the most popular kinds of data races in Java and show you how to catch them using RV-Predict. The examples in this post are included in the RV-Predict distribution under the examples/ directory.