New tool to make code for multithreaded applications more secure

With the advent of multicore processors, multithreaded programming is becoming increasingly important. The company Coverity has released a software package to assist the developer with this.

To take full advantage of the capabilities of modern multicore processors, a software developer must use multiple threads in their program. By using multiple threads, the cores can process instructions simultaneously, which of course benefits the processing speed.

However, multi-threaded programming is more complex and not for every programmer. For example, a so-called race condition to arise; a situation where the outcome of a routine is unexpected and depends on the time taken by the various processes within the application. Another problem that can arise is the so-called deadlock: Two different processes wait forever for the other to finish.

Coverity Thread Analyzer for Java should lend a helping hand here. The package can detect the above problems while running a program so that the developer of the program can take the necessary action. The advantage of the tool is also that it can recognize situations that do not come up during testing, but can cause problems for the customer in rare circumstances.

In addition to detecting the above problems, the program can also help convert single threaded to multi threaded code. The program detects data shared by different threads and advises where locking should be applied. The tool runs on Windows, Linux, OS X and Solaris, and supports the Sun JDK and IBM’s JVM from version 1.5 and BEA Jrockit from version 5.