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Finding PathFinder


By Allen Holub
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June 1, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Every so often I come across a piece of software that stuns me with its potential. Today’s example is Java PathFinder (javapathfinder.sourceforge.net), created by the Robust Software Engineering group at NASA Ames Research Center. I’d not heard of PathFinder until I read a recent press release saying that NASA had put it up on SourceForge, so I logged on to SourceForge just to find out what PathFinder was.

I’m impressed—and not just by the software itself, but by how making it open-source is exactly what’s needed for a valuable resource to reach its full potential. Open-sourcing PathFinder is a brilliant move on the part of NASA.

Without NASA’s original research, PathFinder simply wouldn’t exist. They’ve taken an interesting academic idea that’s been kicking around for a while—finding bugs in software by executing every possible (or at least reasonable) path through the code—and actually produced a program that finds a very-difficult-to-find bug that plagues every multithreaded program: deadlock (where two threads wait forever for each other to give up locks).

Anybody who has spent weeks trying to find a race condition that created a deadlock will immediately understand the importance of this accomplishment. The approach used to track down deadlock can also find other classes of bugs. Right now, PathFinder will find uncaught exceptions, for example, and the technology can be expanded to find other problems in your code.

PathFinder is not a testing framework like JUnit. It actually exercises the code for you, looking for bugs by running that code in a special-purpose VM. (That JVM, by the way, is written in Java. It’s an interesting notion—writing a JVM in Java.)

PathFinder is a research project, however, with no commercial applicability in its current state. The documentation, for example, reads like a dissertation—it’s way too dense to be useful as it stands. You have to be a developer to install the thing and get it running. The two other main shortcomings are a limited source-code size (of about 10K lines of code), which is really mandated by the technology, and an inability to process code that makes native-method calls (AWT, I/O code, etc.). The latter problem is easily solved—in fact, interfaces are provided to do a lot of the work—but these interfaces need to be implemented for all the standard libraries.




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