512 research outputs found
Automatic Verification of Erlang-Style Concurrency
This paper presents an approach to verify safety properties of Erlang-style,
higher-order concurrent programs automatically. Inspired by Core Erlang, we
introduce Lambda-Actor, a prototypical functional language with
pattern-matching algebraic data types, augmented with process creation and
asynchronous message-passing primitives. We formalise an abstract model of
Lambda-Actor programs called Actor Communicating System (ACS) which has a
natural interpretation as a vector addition system, for which some verification
problems are decidable. We give a parametric abstract interpretation framework
for Lambda-Actor and use it to build a polytime computable, flow-based,
abstract semantics of Lambda-Actor programs, which we then use to bootstrap the
ACS construction, thus deriving a more accurate abstract model of the input
program. We have constructed Soter, a tool implementation of the verification
method, thereby obtaining the first fully-automatic, infinite-state model
checker for a core fragment of Erlang. We find that in practice our abstraction
technique is accurate enough to verify an interesting range of safety
properties. Though the ACS coverability problem is Expspace-complete, Soter can
analyse these verification problems surprisingly efficiently.Comment: 12 pages plus appendix, 4 figures, 1 table. The tool is available at
http://mjolnir.cs.ox.ac.uk/soter
A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs
The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent
applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate
through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid
concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in
general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs
reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the
patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this
taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to
static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message
protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify
livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be
used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging
techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for
Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added
references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated
citation
Uniqueness Typing for Resource Management in Message-Passing Concurrency
We view channels as the main form of resources in a message-passing
programming paradigm. These channels need to be carefully managed in settings
where resources are scarce. To study this problem, we extend the pi-calculus
with primitives for channel allocation and deallocation and allow channels to
be reused to communicate values of different types. Inevitably, the added
expressiveness increases the possibilities for runtime errors. We define a
substructural type system which combines uniqueness typing and affine typing to
reject these ill-behaved programs
Explicit connection actions in multiparty session types
This work extends asynchronous multiparty session types (MPST) with explicit connection actions to support protocols with op- tional and dynamic participants. The actions by which endpoints are connected and disconnected are a key element of real-world protocols that is not treated in existing MPST works. In addition, the use cases motivating explicit connections often require a more relaxed form of mul- tiparty choice: these extensions do not satisfy the conservative restric- tions used to ensure safety in standard syntactic MPST. Instead, we de- velop a modelling-based approach to validate MPST safety and progress for these enriched protocols. We present a toolchain implementation, for distributed programming based on our extended MPST in Java, and a core formalism, demonstrating the soundness of our approach. We discuss key implementation issues related to the proposed extensions: a practi- cal treatment of choice subtyping for MPST progress, and multiparty correlation of dynamic binary connections
How functional programming mattered
In 1989 when functional programming was still considered a niche topic, Hughes wrote a visionary paper arguing convincingly ‘why functional programming matters’. More than two decades have passed. Has functional programming really mattered? Our answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’. Functional programming is now at the forefront of a new generation of programming technologies, and enjoying increasing popularity and influence. In this paper, we review the impact of functional programming, focusing on how it has changed the way we may construct programs, the way we may verify programs, and fundamentally the way we may think about programs
Linearly Typed Dyadic Group Sessions for Building Multiparty Sessions
Traditionally, each party in a (dyadic or multiparty) session implements
exactly one role specified in the type of the session. We refer to this kind of
session as an individual session (i-session). As a generalization of i-session,
a group session (g-session) is one in which each party may implement a group of
roles based on one channel. In particular, each of the two parties involved in
a dyadic g-session implements either a group of roles or its complement. In
this paper, we present a formalization of g-sessions in a multi-threaded
lambda-calculus (MTLC) equipped with a linear type system, establishing for the
MTLC both type preservation and global progress. As this formulated MTLC can be
readily embedded into ATS, a full-fledged language with a functional
programming core that supports both dependent types (of DML-style) and linear
types, we obtain a direct implementation of linearly typed g-sessions in ATS.
The primary contribution of the paper lies in both of the identification of
g-sessions as a fundamental building block for multiparty sessions and the
theoretical development in support of this identification.Comment: This paper can be seen as the pre-sequel to classical linear
multirole logic (CLML). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1603.0372
On the Computation Power of Name Parameterization in Higher-order Processes
Parameterization extends higher-order processes with the capability of
abstraction (akin to that in lambda-calculus), and is known to be able to
enhance the expressiveness. This paper focuses on the parameterization of
names, i.e. a construct that maps a name to a process, in the higher-order
setting. We provide two results concerning its computation capacity. First,
name parameterization brings up a complete model, in the sense that it can
express an elementary interactive model with built-in recursive functions.
Second, we compare name parameterization with the well-known pi-calculus, and
provide two encodings between them.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2015, arXiv:1508.0459
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