Detection of deadlocks in multiprocess systems
J. G. Hunt · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1986
During the development of a recent project*, a number of problems were encountered with deadlocks. At the beginning of the next project*, a method was adopted to enable the detection of situations which might lead to deadlock. (The implementation used required a simple programming discipline to be observed, but could equally have been achieved by a minor extension to the language & compiler.) The attention that programmers were thus forced to pay to the problem meant that fewer deadlocks were designed & implemented; whilst the early detection of the few that did slip through meant that the correction was generally trivial both to implement & to test.