[erlang-questions] McErlang

[Lars-Åke Fredlund]

Hello all,

as you have noticed we haven't really been working on McErlang for some 
time. There is no support for some modern features of Erlang, and 
frankly I doubt we will have time to fix things in the short term.

McErlang was a cool project though. Is McErlang better or worse than 
Concuerror? Well, it is always better to use a maintained tool than a 
tool that nobody has time to fix. The tools are based on different 
internal ideas, with different search strategies, which at least in 
theory can cause some errors to be detected by one tool to fail to be 
detected by the other tool, and vice versa. Clearly applying Concuerror 
to a program is easier than applying McErlang, and so I would definitely 
try using Concuerror first.

Another tool  worth trying is QuickCheck with the pulse random 
scheduler; it can be surprisingly good at detecting concurrency bugs 
with a very moderate effort.

Lars-Ake



On 03/10/17 09:40, zxq9 wrote:
> On 2017年10月03日 火曜日 08:27:06 Kostis Sagonas wrote:
>> On 10/03/2017 07:13 AM, zxq9 wrote:
>>>> Now this looked like a very useful tool, but before I
>>>> spend any time getting a clean compilation,
>>>>     - is anyone else (still) using McErlang?
>>>>     - has McErlang been replaced by something better that
>>>>       I can afford?
>>>>     - or should I just forget all about it?
>>> ... <SNIP> ...
>>>
>>> Concurrent model testing in Erlang is a rather large gap we have that
>>> tends to get covered by actual runs and post-mortem analysis. Which is
>>> actually fine for the majority of cases (clearly; we've gotten this far)
>>> but having a tool that can do for concurrent sequence testing what tools
>>> like PropER can do for functional testing would be quite useful.
>> I think that you should really take a look at Concuerror.
>>
>> 	http://concuerror.com/
>>
>> Besides various tutorials, which are quite comprehensive, it also comes
>> with (not always easy to read) papers that explain its technology and
>> its differences from McErlang.
>>
>> I am of course very partial, since I'm heavily involved in its design
>> and development, but it's in many ways a superior tool.
>>
>> Hope that others find it useful; some already have.
> Wow, awesome!
>
> This is an area I haven't had a chance to get on board with yet (limited
> time) but I'm very glad that ROK's email wound up pointing me toward both
> McErlang and inadvertently led me to Concuerror.
>
> Thank you guys for the link!
>
> -Craig
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