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Record W7132910493

PyTsan: Automated Data Race Detection in Python Programs

2025· dissertation· W7132910493 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Chaoyue Gong

Bibliographic record

VenueTSpace · 2025
Typedissertation
Language
FieldComputer Science
TopicComputational Physics and Python Applications
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsPython (programming language)InterpreterCompilerSoftwareMIT LicenseCompiled language
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Python and its ecosystem have become integral to modern software development. Despite Python’s popularity, CPython, the reference implementation, has significant performance limitations compared with other widely used programming language implementations. In particular, while CPython supports threads and concurrency, it also uses a global interpreter lock (GIL) to synchronize the execution of Python code. As a result, developers both intentionally and unintentionally overlook subtle synchronization details when writing Python code. In 2023, CPython finally added a build option to compile a “free-threaded” variant of CPython without a GIL. The long-existing GIL minimizes the likelihood of unsynchronized code manifesting as bugs, but such races easily start appearing in a free-threaded build of CPython. In this thesis, we present PyTsan, a dynamic data race detector designed for Python, capable of methodologically detecting hard-to-find data races. When running it on CPython 3.10’s standard library test suite, PyTsan reports 29 data races. Two of those data races were reported by others experimenting with CPython’s new free-threaded build, but had otherwise existed undetected for over 10 years. Furthermore, PyTsan shows that for one of the “fixed” bugs, on architectures other than x86/amd64, such as ARM or RISC-V, the merged resolution is insufficient.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.025
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.008
Threshold uncertainty score0.032

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.025
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.002
Bibliometrics0.0030.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.002
Scholarly communication0.0030.005
Open science0.0040.005
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.004

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.046
GPT teacher head0.378
Teacher spread0.332 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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