More on locking

Jeff Darcy over at “Canned Platypus” writes about “How to add locking to a program”. He laments the lack of a reasonably priced deadlock detection tool. I assume, from his backgrond, that he’s interested in an Linux tool, so my deadlock detection tool wont help him much but it’s good to know that it’s not just me that thinks such a tool would be useful…

Jeff links to some expensive static code analysis tools that do deadlock detection. My tool doesn’t rely on static code analysis, so you don’t need to have source to run it. It can tell you that you have a potential deadlock present in the application without debug symbols or pdbs and it can show you where it is if you have the symbols. Of course the advantage of static code analysis is that you don’t have to run the code and you don’t have to get the code to execute the code paths that could have problems. My deadlock detection tool would, ideally, be run whilst you’re running your normal “black box” application tests; and hopefully they exercise all your code paths!

Note: the deadlock detector mentioned in this blog post is now available for download from www.lockexplorer.com.