LitmusKt: Concurrency Stress Testing for Kotlin

Denis Lochmelis, Evgenii Moiseenko, Yaroslav Golubev, and Anton Podkopaev

January, 2025. Published on arXiv.

Abstract. We present LitmusKt - the first tool for litmus testing concurrent programs in Kotlin. The tool's novelty also lies in the fact that Kotlin is a multiplatform language, i.e., it compiles into multiple platforms, which means that the concurrency has to be tested on several of them. Our tool allows writing litmus tests in a single custom DSL, and these tests are then run in Kotlin/Native and Kotlin/JVM, two main platforms for concurrent programming in Kotlin. Using LitmusKt, we discovered novel bugs in the Kotlin compiler, which we then fixed and they are no longer present. Moreover, LitmusKt was integrated into the CI pipeline for Kotlin. We believe that our tool is valuable for further studying concurrency in Kotlin and other multiplatform languages, as well as for further developing the Kotlin memory model.

LitmusKt is openly available on GitHub: https://github.com/Jetbrains-Research/litmuskt. The demonstration video is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gXI0aYJDnRw.