×

Specifying and verifying concurrent algorithms with histories and subjectivity. (English) Zbl 1335.68067

Vitek, Jan (ed.), Programming languages and systems. 24th European symposium on programming, ESOP 2015, held as part of the European joint conferences on theory and practice of software, ETAPS 2015, London, UK, April 11–18, 2015. Proceedings. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-662-46668-1/pbk; 978-3-662-46669-8/ebook). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9032, 333-358 (2015).
Summary: We present a lightweight approach to Hoare-style specifications for fine-grained concurrency, based on a notion of time-stamped histories that abstractly capture atomic changes in the program state. Our key observation is that histories form a partial commutative monoid, a structure fundamental for representation of concurrent resources. This insight provides us with a unifying mechanism that allows us to treat histories just like heaps in separation logic. For example, both are subject to the same assertion logic and inference rules (e.g., the frame rule). Moreover, the notion of ownership transfer, which usually applies to heaps, has an equivalent in histories. It can be used to formally represent helping – an important design pattern for concurrent algorithms whereby one thread can execute code on behalf of another. Specifications in terms of histories naturally abstract away the internal interference, so that sophisticated fine-grained algorithms can be given the same specifications as their simplified coarse-grained counterparts, making them equally convenient for client-side reasoning. We illustrate our approach on a number of examples and validate all of them in Coq.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1333.68020].

MSC:

68N30 Mathematical aspects of software engineering (specification, verification, metrics, requirements, etc.)

Software:

Coq
PDFBibTeX XMLCite
Full Text: DOI arXiv