We describe a formal verification framework and tool implementation, based upon cyclic proofs, for certifying the safe termination of imperative pointer programs with recursive procedures. Our assertions are symbolic heaps in separation logic with user defined inductive predicates; we employ explicit approximations of these predicates as our termination measures. This enables us to extend cyclic proof to programs with procedures by relating these measures across the preand postconditions of procedure calls.We provide an implementation of our formal proof system in the CYCLIST theorem proving framework, and evaluate its performance on a range of examples drawn from the literature on program termination. Our implementation extends the current state-of-the-art in cyclic proof-based program verification, enabling automatic termination proofs of a larger set of programs than previously possible.Here List(x) is an inductively defined predicate of separation logic describing null-terminated linked lists with head pointer

Supporting inductive reasoning is an essential component is any framework of use in computer science. To do so, the logical framework must extend that of first-order logic. Transitive closure logic is a known extension of first-order logic that is particularly straightforward to automate. While other extensions of first-order logic with inductive definitions are a priori parametrized by a set of inductive definitions, the addition of a single transitive closure operator has the advantage of uniformly capturing all finitary inductive definitions. To further improve the reasoning techniques for transitive closure logic, we here present an infinitary proof system for it, which is an infinite descent –style counterpart to the existing (explicit induction) proof system for the logic. We show that the infinitary system is complete for the standard semantics and subsumes the explicit system. Moreover, the uniformity of the transitive closure operator allows semantically meaningful complete restrictions to be defined using simple syntactic criteria. Consequently, the restriction to regular infinitary (i.e.,  cyclic ) proofs provides the basis for an effective system for automating inductive reasoning.

We describe the first approach to automatically synthesizing heap-manipulating programs with auxiliary recursive procedures. Such procedures occur routinely in data structure transformations (e.g., flattening a tree into a list) or traversals of composite structures (e.g., n-ary trees). Our approach, dubbed cyclic program synthesis, enhances deductive program synthesis with a novel application of cyclic proofs. Specifically, we observe that the machinery used to form cycles in cyclic proofs can be reused to systematically and efficiently abduce recursive auxiliary procedures.We develop the theory of cyclic program synthesis by extending Synthetic Separation Logic (SSL), a logical framework for deductive synthesis of heap-manipulating programs from Separation Logic specifications. We implement our approach as a tool called Cypress, and showcase it by automatically synthesizing a number of programs manipulating linked data structures using recursive auxiliary procedures and mutual recursion, many of which were beyond the reach of existing program synthesis tools.CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Automatic programming.

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