ftcheck

Alpha (0.1). Read docs/limitations.md before trusting any output.

ftcheck looks for free-threading bugs in Rust/PyO3 extensions: data races, crashes, hangs and panics that appear only when Python threads really run in parallel.

A Rust extension that was correct under the GIL can be silently wrong without it, because the GIL provided mutual exclusion the author never had to think about. The failure mode is data corruption and rare crashes, not a compile error.

Two things this does not claim

Stated up front, because they are the claims a tool in this space is tempted to make.

• It does not bring free-threading to GitHub Actions. actions/setup-python has installed 3.13t and 3.14t since PR #973.
• It does not generate a concurrency harness automatically. Constructor synthesis for non-primitive #[pyclass] types is not viable: stress derives constructors that take only primitives, and any other type needs a declared factory.

It also does not distribute a ThreadSanitizer-instrumented CPython image, because one already exists: nascheme/cpython_sanity publishes ghcr.io/nascheme/cpython-tsan, both the py-free-threading guide and the PyO3 guide recommend it, and NumPy's CI already uses it. ftcheck ci consumes that image and adds only the Rust layer.

Install

$ pip install ftcheck        # or: uv tool install ftcheck

Wheels are published for CPython 3.11 and later, including free-threaded 3.14, on Linux (x86-64, aarch64), macOS (x86-64, arm64) and Windows (x86-64). What runs where:

Quick start

Everything runs from one Docker image: the upstream ThreadSanitizer free-threaded CPython, a matching nightly Rust, and ftcheck. Build it once, from this checkout:

$ docker build -f docker/Dockerfile -t ftcheck-tsan .

Then, from your extension's directory, define the one prefix every command uses:

$ mkdir -p ~/.cache/ftcheck-cargo
$ FTCHECK='docker run --rm --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --user '"$(id -u):$(id -g)"' -e HOME=/tmp -v '"$PWD"':/src -v '"$HOME"'/.cache/ftcheck-cargo:/opt/cargo/registry ftcheck-tsan ftcheck'
$ $FTCHECK lint /src      # seconds: a static pre-flight
$ $FTCHECK ci /src        # minutes: your tests, every test body in 8 threads, under TSan
$ $FTCHECK stress /src    # minutes: one shared instance per type, driven from 8 threads

What each part is for:

• --security-opt seccomp=unconfined — ThreadSanitizer cannot start under the ASLR entropy modern kernels use; this lets it disable ASLR for its own process. Needed by ci and stress; harmless for the rest. See docs/ci.md.
• --user … -e HOME=/tmp — build output lands in your project owned by you, not root.
• -v ~/.cache/ftcheck-cargo:/opt/cargo/registry — keeps downloaded crates between runs; without it every run downloads them again.
• If your crate is not at the repository root, pass its directory (/src/bindings/python) and still mount the whole repository, so path dependencies resolve.

lint and matrix also run without Docker: pip install ftcheck, then ftcheck lint ..

What works today

ftcheck ci — the ThreadSanitizer pipeline

Builds your extension with -Zsanitizer=thread and -Zbuild-std, installs it on a TSan-instrumented free-threaded CPython, and runs your own test suite with every test body in N threads at once, so a module-level instance your tests touch is shared across threads — the situation the GIL used to make safe.

$ $FTCHECK ci /src
built ft001_static_mut.cpython-314t-x86_64-linux-gnu.so with ThreadSanitizer
ran 1 test x 8 threads (pytest exit 0; 0 failed, 0 errors)

1 finding:

  tsan/data-race  src/lib.rs:14:9  [certain]  (reported 2x)
        ThreadSanitizer: data race. Write of size 8 by thread T7 in `bump`;
        Previous write of size 8 by thread T8 in `bump`

Before it builds anything it checks every condition under which a TSan run is silently wrong — mismatched LLVM between Rust and CPython, force_seq_cst_atomics, missing rust-src, a GIL-enabled or uninstrumented interpreter — and refuses with exit 3 rather than reporting a clean run. See docs/ci.md for the full command, GitHub Actions usage, and the host ASLR requirement.

ftcheck stress — one shared instance, many threads

ci finds a race only if your tests happen to share an object between threads, and most suites build a fresh one per test. stress builds one instance of each type and drives every pair of its methods from N threads at once — as many pairs as the time budget allows, and the report says how many that was — under ThreadSanitizer, with a seed that replays the schedule:

$ $FTCHECK stress /src
seed 1234  threads 8  iterations 200  budget 120s
  replay: ftcheck stress --replay 1234 --threads 8

coverage: 1 of 1 callables driven

  ft001_raw_pointer.ft001_raw_pointer.Buffer  [derived: Buffer(1)]  1/1 pairs
    driven      ft001_raw_pointer.ft001_raw_pointer.Buffer.bump  (3200 calls; raised IndexError x1099)

1 finding:

  tsan/data-race  src/lib.rs:35:13  [certain]  (reported 2x)

No test was written for that. Constructors that need more than primitives take a one-line factory in ftcheck.toml; every callable that could not be driven is named, with the reason. fixtures/racy/stress-unshared-state proves the gap: its own tests never share an instance, and the ground truth asserts ci exits 0 and stress exits 1 on it. See docs/stress.md.

ftcheck lint — a fast pre-flight

$ ftcheck lint path/to/your/crate
scanned 1 file, 1 Python entry point, PyO3 0.29.2

1 finding:

  FT001  src/lib.rs:14:9  [certain]
        `bump` reaches the `static mut` `COUNTER` with no synchronisation

The lint is not the product. It is deliberately small, because rustc already rejects most of what a naive rule set would check. See docs/rules.md.

ftcheck matrix prints free-threaded wheel jobs for a release workflow, with every interpreter named explicitly. Check what your maturin version's generate-ci already emits first. See docs/matrix.md.

Exit codes

3 is the one that matters. ftcheck never claims code is safe, only that nothing was found on the surface it actually exercised — so a run that never happened must not be reportable as a clean one.

What it refuses to assert

• It does not prove the absence of races. The report reads "no race detected on the exercised surface", never "safe". A test asserts that word never appears.
• It reports its own coverage — files scanned, entry points seen, and every file it could not parse, named rather than skipped; tests run and threads used. A sanitizer run that executed no test exits 3, not 0.
• Races inside CPython are reported separately and do not fail your run — including those your extension merely reached, which are labelled as such rather than blamed on it.
• It does not stop at data races. A crash, a hang, or a Rust panic that happens only under concurrency is a finding too; each is a real failure users would hit, and none of them is a TSan data-race report. What stress cannot yet see — wrong results that return normally, among others — is listed in docs/limitations.md.
• likely findings are hidden by default and do not affect the exit code unless you ask for them (lint --confidence likely).
• It does not rate severity or exploitability.
• It does not replace pytest-run-parallel. That tool runs your existing tests in parallel; it cannot discover issues arising from multithreaded use of data structures defined by the library under test, which is what ftcheck stress is for.
• The lint's record on public code is published, unflattering or not. Its first run over 23 public PyO3 projects: 3 certain findings, 0 confirmed; FT003 at 13% precision. Both were fixed from that evidence. FT003 now measures 67%, but on the same projects the fixes were learned from, so that is not an independent figure. See docs/limitations.md.

Ground truth

Every rule is backed by fixtures in fixtures/, each carrying an expected.toml that states what a correct tool must say about it — both what the lint must report and whether ThreadSanitizer must see a race. A finding on a clean fixture fails the suite exactly as hard as a miss on a racy one, in both halves.

The most useful pair is racy/ft002-freelist-old-pyo3 and clean/clean-freelist-current-pyo3: the same source apart from the module name, pinned to different PyO3 versions, because whether that code is a bug depends on the framework version and not on the code.

Development

cargo test --workspace     # rust unit tests
pytest tests/              # contract, CLI and ground-truth suites
./scripts/check-publish-guards.sh  # publish guards

docker build -f docker/Dockerfile -t ftcheck-tsan .
FTCHECK_TSAN=1 pytest tests/test_tsan_ground_truth.py   # every fixture under TSan

Licence

MIT OR Apache-2.0.