Abstract Diagnosis for Timed Concurrent Constraint programs

The Timed Concurrent Constraint Language (tccp in short) is a concurrent logic language based on the simple but powerful concurrent constraint paradigm of Saraswat. In this paradigm, the notion of store-as-value is replaced by the notion of store-as-constraint, which introduces some differences w.r.t. other approaches to concurrency. In this paper, we provide a general framework for the debugging of tccp programs. To this end, we first present a new compact, bottom-up semantics for the language that is well suited for debugging and verification purposes in the context of reactive systems. We also provide an abstract semantics that allows us to effectively implement debugging algorithms based on abstract interpretation. Given a tccp program and a behavior specification, our debugging approach automatically detects whether the program satisfies the specification. This differs from other semiautomatic approaches to debugging and avoids the need to provide symptoms in advance. We show the efficacy of our approach by introducing two illustrative examples. We choose a specific abstract domain and show how we can detect that a program is erroneous.Comment: 16 page

Continuation-Passing C: compiling threads to events through continuations

In this paper, we introduce Continuation Passing C (CPC), a programming language for concurrent systems in which native and cooperative threads are unified and presented to the programmer as a single abstraction. The CPC compiler uses a compilation technique, based on the CPS transform, that yields efficient code and an extremely lightweight representation for contexts. We provide a proof of the correctness of our compilation scheme. We show in particular that lambda-lifting, a common compilation technique for functional languages, is also correct in an imperative language like C, under some conditions enforced by the CPC compiler. The current CPC compiler is mature enough to write substantial programs such as Hekate, a highly concurrent BitTorrent seeder. Our benchmark results show that CPC is as efficient, while using significantly less space, as the most efficient thread libraries available.Comment: Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation (2012). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1202.324

Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography

An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm

Mechanized semantics

The goal of this lecture is to show how modern theorem provers---in this case, the Coq proof assistant---can be used to mechanize the specification of programming languages and their semantics, and to reason over individual programs and over generic program transformations, as typically found in compilers. The topics covered include: operational semantics (small-step, big-step, definitional interpreters); a simple form of denotational semantics; axiomatic semantics and Hoare logic; generation of verification conditions, with application to program proof; compilation to virtual machine code and its proof of correctness; an example of an optimizing program transformation (dead code elimination) and its proof of correctness

Adequacy of compositional translations for observational semantics

We investigate methods and tools for analysing translations between programming languages with respect to observational semantics. The behaviour of programs is observed in terms of may- and must-convergence in arbitrary contexts, and adequacy of translations, i.e., the reflection of program equivalence, is taken to be the fundamental correctness condition. For compositional translations we propose a notion of convergence equivalence as a means for proving adequacy. This technique avoids explicit reasoning about contexts, and is able to deal with the subtle role of typing in implementations of language extension

Faster linearizability checking via PP-compositionality

Linearizability is a well-established consistency and correctness criterion for concurrent data types. An important feature of linearizability is Herlihy and Wing's locality principle, which says that a concurrent system is linearizable if and only if all of its constituent parts (so-called objects) are linearizable. This paper presents $P$-compositionality, which generalizes the idea behind the locality principle to operations on the same concurrent data type. We implement $P$-compositionality in a novel linearizability checker. Our experiments with over nine implementations of concurrent sets, including Intel's TBB library, show that our linearizability checker is one order of magnitude faster and/or more space efficient than the state-of-the-art algorithm.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Transformations of CCP programs

We introduce a transformation system for concurrent constraint programming (CCP). We define suitable applicability conditions for the transformations which guarantee that the input/output CCP semantics is preserved also when distinguishing deadlocked computations from successful ones and when considering intermediate results of (possibly) non-terminating computations. The system allows us to optimize CCP programs while preserving their intended meaning: In addition to the usual benefits that one has for sequential declarative languages, the transformation of concurrent programs can also lead to the elimination of communication channels and of synchronization points, to the transformation of non-deterministic computations into deterministic ones, and to the crucial saving of computational space. Furthermore, since the transformation system preserves the deadlock behavior of programs, it can be used for proving deadlock freeness of a given program wrt a class of queries. To this aim it is sometimes sufficient to apply our transformations and to specialize the resulting program wrt the given queries in such a way that the obtained program is trivially deadlock free.Comment: To appear in ACM TOPLA