Modern software applications rely on the execution and coordination of many different kinds of tasks. Often overlooked is the need to sometimes prematurely terminate or cancel a task, either to accommodate a conflicting task, to manage system resources, or in response to system or user events that make the task irrelevant. In this paper, we studied 62 cancel-feature requests and 156 cancel-related bugs across 13 popular distributed and concurrent systems written in Java, C#, and Go to understand why task cancel is needed, what are the challenges in implementing task cancel, and how severe are cancel-related failures. Guided by the study, we generalized a few cancel-related anti-patterns, and implemented static checkers that found many code snippets matching these anti-patterns in the latest versions of these popular systems. We hope this study will help guide better and more systematic approaches to task cancellation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Modern software applications rely on the execution and coordination of many different kinds of tasks. Often overlooked is the need to sometimes prematurely terminate or cancel a task, either to accommodate a conflicting task, to manage system resources, or in response to system or user events that make the task irrelevant. 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