Iris is a framework for higher-order concurrent separation logic, which has been implemented in the Coq proof assistant and deployed very effectively in a wide variety of verification projects. Iris was designed with the express goal of simplifying and consolidating the foundations of modern separation logics, but it has evolved over time, and the design and semantic foundations of Iris itself have yet to be fully written down and explained together properly in one place. Here, we attempt to fill this gap, presenting a reasonably complete picture of the latest version of Iris (version 3.1), from first principles and in one coherent narrative.

Rust is a new systems programming language that promises to overcome the seemingly fundamental tradeoff between high-level safety guarantees and low-level control over resource management. Unfortunately, none of Rust's safety claims have been formally proven, and there is good reason to question whether they actually hold. Specifically, Rust employs a strong, ownership-based type system, but then extends the expressive power of this core type system through libraries that internally use unsafe features. In this paper, we give the first formal (and machine-checked) safety proof for a language representing a realistic subset of Rust. Our proof is extensible in the sense that, for each new Rust library that uses unsafe features, we can say what verification condition it must satisfy in order for it to be deemed a safe extension to the language. We have carried out this verification for some of the most important libraries that are used throughout the Rust ecosystem.

The C/C++11 memory model defines the semantics of concurrent memory accesses in C/C++, and in particular supports racy "atomic" accesses at a range of different consistency levels, from very weak consistency ("relaxed") to strong, sequential consistency ("SC"). Unfortunately, as we observe in this paper, the semantics of SC atomic accesses in C/C++11, as well as in all proposed strengthenings of the semantics, is flawed, in that (contrary to previously published results) both suggested compilation schemes to the Power architecture are unsound. We propose a model, called RC11 (for Repaired C11), with a better semantics for SC accesses that restores the soundness of the compilation schemes to Power, maintains the DRF-SC guarantee, and provides stronger, more useful, guarantees to SC fences. In addition, we formally prove, for the first time, the correctness of the proposed stronger compilation schemes to Power that preserve load-to-store ordering and avoid "out-of-thin-air" reads.

Mitchell's notion of representation independence is a particularly useful application of Reynolds' relational parametricity -two different implementations of an abstract data type can be shown contextually equivalent so long as there exists a relation between their type representations that is preserved by their operations. There have been a number of methods proposed for proving representation independence in various pure extensions of System F (where data abstraction is achieved through existential typing), as well as in Algol-or Java-like languages (where data abstraction is achieved through the use of local mutable state). However, none of these approaches addresses the interaction of existential type abstraction and local state. In particular, none allows one to prove representation independence results for generative ADTs -i.e., ADTs that both maintain some local state and define abstract types whose internal representations are dependent on that local state.In this paper, we present a syntactic, logical-relations-based method for proving representation independence of generative ADTs in a language supporting polymorphic types, existential types, general recursive types, and unrestricted ML-style mutable references. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by using it to prove several interesting contextual equivalences that involve a close interaction between existential typing and local state, as well as some well-known equivalences from the literature (such as Pitts and Stark's "awkward" example) that have caused trouble for previous logical-relations-based methods.The success of our method relies on two key technical innovations. First, in order to handle generative ADTs, we develop a possible-worlds model in which relational interpretations of types are allowed to grow over time in a manner that is tightly coupled with changes to some local state. Second, we employ a step-indexed stratification of possible worlds, which facilitates a simplified account of mutable references of higher type.

The development of concurrent separation logic (CSL) has sparked a long line of work on modular verification of sophisticated concurrent programs. Two of the most important features supported by several existing extensions to CSL are higher-order quantification and custom ghost state. However, none of the logics that support both of these features reap the full potential of their combination. In particular, none of them provide general support for a feature we dub "higher-order ghost state": the ability to store arbitrary higherorder separation-logic predicates in ghost variables.In this paper, we propose higher-order ghost state as a interesting and useful extension to CSL, which we formalize in the framework of Jung et al.'s recently developed Iris logic. To justify its soundness, we develop a novel algebraic structure called CMRAs ("cameras"), which can be thought of as "step-indexed partial commutative monoids". Finally, we show that Iris proofs utilizing higher-order ghost state can be effectively formalized in Coq, and discuss the challenges we faced in formalizing them.

Abstract. Concurrent separation logics (CSLs) have come of age, and with age they have accumulated a great deal of complexity. Previous work on the Iris logic attempted to reduce the complex logical mechanisms of modern CSLs to two orthogonal concepts: partial commutative monoids (PCMs) and invariants. However, the realization of these concepts in Iris still bakes in several complex mechanisms-such as weakest preconditions and mask-changing view shifts-as primitive notions.In this paper, we take the Iris story to its (so to speak) logical conclusion, applying the reductionist methodology of Iris to Iris itself. Specifically, we define a small, resourceful base logic, which distills the essence of Iris: it comprises only the assertion layer of vanilla separation logic, plus a handful of simple modalities. We then show how the much fancier logical mechanisms of Iris-in particular, its entire program specification layer-can be understood as merely derived forms in our base logic. This approach helps to explain the meaning of Iris's program specifications at a much higher level of abstraction than was previously possible. We also show that the step-indexed "later" modality of Iris is an essential source of complexity, in that removing it leads to a logical inconsistency. All our results are fully formalized in the Coq proof assistant. IntroductionIn his paper The Next 700 Separation Logics, Parkinson [26] observed that "separation logic has brought great advances in the world of verification. However, there is a disturbing trend for each new library or concurrency primitive to require a new separation logic." He argued that what is needed is a general logic for concurrent reasoning, into which a variety of useful specifications can be encoded via the abstraction facilities of the logic. "By finding the right core logic," he wrote, "we can concentrate on the difficult problems."The logic he suggested as a potential candidate for such a core concurrency logic was deny-guarantee [12]. Deny-guarantee was indeed groundbreaking in its support for "fictional separation"-the idea that even if threads are concurrently manipulating the same shared piece of physical state, one can view them as operating on logically disjoint pieces of it and use separation logic to reason modularly about those pieces. It was, however, far from the last word on the subject. Rather, 2 Krebbers, Jung, Bizjak, Jourdan, Dreyer, Birkedal it spawned a new breed of logics with ever more powerful fictional-separation mechanisms for reasoning modularly about interference [11,16,29,9,30,27]. Several of these also incorporated support for impredicative invariants [28,18,17,4], which are needed if one aims to verify code in languages with semantically cyclic features (such as ML or Rust, which support higher-order state).Although exciting, the progress in this area has come at a cost: as these new separation logics become ever more expressive, each one accumulates increasingly baroque and bespoke proof rules, which are primitive in the sense that their sou...

ML modules are a powerful language mechanism for decomposing programs into reusable components. Unfortunately, they also have a reputation for being "complex" and requiring fancy type theory that is mostly opaque to non-experts. While this reputation is certainly understandable, given the many non-standard methodologies that have been developed in the process of studying modules, we aim here to demonstrate that it is undeserved. To do so, we present a novel formalization of ML modules, which defines their semantics directly by a compositional "elaboration" translation into plain System F ω (the higher-order polymorphic λ-calculus). To demonstrate the scalability of our "F-ing" semantics, we use it to define a representative, higher-order ML-style module language, encompassing all the major features of existing ML module dialects (except for recursive modules). We thereby show that ML modules are merely a particular mode of use of System F ω .To streamline the exposition, we present the semantics of our module language in stages. We begin by defining a subset of the language supporting a Standard ML-like language with second-class modules and generative functors. We then extend this sublanguage with the ability to package modules as first-class values (a very simple extension, as it turns out) and OCaml-style applicative functors (somewhat harder). Unlike previous work combining both generative and applicative functors, we do not require two distinct forms of functor or signature sealing. Instead, whether a functor is applicative or not depends only on the computational purity of its body. In fact, we argue that applicative/generative is rather incidental terminology for pure versus impure functors. This approach results in a semantics that we feel is simpler and more natural than previous accounts, and moreover prohibits breaches of abstraction safety that were possible under them.

Reasoning about program equivalence is one of the oldest problems in semantics. In recent years, useful techniques have been developed, based on bisimulations and logical relations, for reasoning about equivalence in the setting of increasingly realistic languages-languages nearly as complex as ML or Haskell. Much of the recent work in this direction has considered the interesting representation independence principles enabled by the use of local state, but it is also important to understand the principles that powerful features like higher-order state and control effects disable. This latter topic has been broached extensively within the framework of game semantics, resulting in what Abramsky dubbed the "semantic cube": fully abstract game-semantic characterizations of various axes in the design space of ML-like languages. But when it comes to reasoning about many actual examples, game semantics does not yet supply a useful technique for proving equivalences.In this paper, we marry the aspirations of the semantic cube to the powerful proof method of step-indexed Kripke logical relations. Building on recent work of Ahmed et al. (2009), we define the first fully abstract logical relation for an ML-like language with recursive types, abstract types, general references and call/cc. We then show how, under orthogonal restrictions to the expressive power of our language-namely, the restriction to first-order state and/or the removal of call/cc-we can enhance the proving power of our possibleworlds model in correspondingly orthogonal ways, and we demonstrate this proving power on a range of interesting examples. Central to our story is the use of state transition systems to model the way in which properties of local state evolve over time.