Verifying Functional Behaviour of Concurrent Programs

Abstract

Specifying the functional behaviour of a concurrent program can often be quite troublesome: it is hard to provide a stable method contract that can not be invalidated by other threads. In this paper we propose a novel modular technique for specifying and verifying behavioural properties in concurrent programs. Our approach uses history-based specifications. A history is a process algebra term built of actions, where each action represents an update over a heap location. Instead of describing the precise object's state, a method contract may describe the method's behaviour in terms of actions recorded in the history. The client class can later use the history to reason about the concrete state of the object.Our approach allows providing simple and intuitive specifications, while the logic is a simple extension of permissionbased separation logic.

LAGC Semantics of Concurrent Programming Languages

“…To specify fully abstract interface behavior these systems need to simulate histories in an ad hoc manner, see [46,Figure 1]. A combination of permission-based separation logic [7] and histories has recently been proposed for modular reasoning about multi-threaded concurrency [69]. The motivation for our work stems from our aim to devise compositional proof systems to verify protocol-like behavior for object-oriented languages [27] by combining communication histories for ABS with the trace modality formulas of Nakata et al [60,18].…”