article

McErlang: a model checker for a distributed functional programming language

Authors:

Lars-Åke Fredlund,

Hans SvenssonAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 42, Issue 9

Pages 125 - 136

https://doi.org/10.1145/1291220.1291171

Published: 01 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We present a model checker for verifying distributed programs written in the Erlang programming language. Providing a model checker for Erlang is especially rewarding since the language is by now being seen as a very capable platform for developing industrial strength distributed applications with excellent failure tolerance characteristics. In contrast to most other Erlang verification attempts, we provide support for a very substantial part of the language. The model checker has full Erlang data type support, support for general process communication, node semantics (inter-process behave subtly different from intra-process communication), fault detection and fault tolerance through process linking, and can verify programs written using the OTP Erlang component library (used by most modern Erlang programs).

As the model checking tool is itself implemented in Erlang we benefit from the advantages that a (dynamically typed) functional programming language offers: easy prototyping and experimentation with new verification algorithms, rich executable models that use complex data structures directly programmed in Erlang, the ability to treat executable models interchangeably as programs (to be executed directly by the Erlang interpreter) and data, and not least the possibility to cleanly structure and to cleanly combine various verification sub-tasks. In the paper we discuss the design of the tool and provide early indications on its performance.

References

[1]

T. Andrews, S. Qadeer, S. K. Rajamani, J. Rehof, and Y. Xie. Zing: A model checker for concurrent software. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume Vol. 3114, pages 484--487, Jan 2004.

[2]

J. Armstrong. Programming Erlang - Software for a Concurrent World. The Pragmatic Programmers, http://books.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang, 2007.

Digital Library

[3]

J. Armstrong. Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors. PhD thesis, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, December 2003.

[4]

J. Armstrong, R. Virding, C. Wikström, and M. Williams. Concurrent Programming in Erlang. Prentice-Hall, 1996.

Digital Library

[5]

T. Arts and L. Fredlund. Trace analysis of Erlang programs. SIGPLAN Not., 37 (12), 2002. ISSN 0362-1340.

Digital Library

[6]

T. Arts and J. Hughes. QuickCheck for Erlang. In Proceedings of the 2003 Erlang User Conference (EUC), 2003.

[7]

T. Arts, C. Benac Earle, and J. J. Sánchez Penas. Translating Erlang to mucrl. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Application of Concurrency to System Design (ACSD2004). IEEE Computer Society Press, June 2004.

[8]

T. Arts, C. Benac Earle, and J. Derrick. Development of a verified Erlang program for resource locking. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT), 5 (2-3): 205--220, March 2004.

Digital Library

[9]

T. Arts, K. Claessen, and H. Svensson. Semi-formal development of a fault-tolerant leader election protocol in Erlang. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3395: 140--154, January 2005.

Digital Library

[10]

S. Blau and J. Rooth. AXD 301 - a new generation ATM switching system. Ericsson Review, 1: 10--17, 1998.

[11]

K. Claessen and H. Svensson. A semantics for distributed Erlang. In Proceedings of the ACM SIPGLAN 2005 Erlang Workshop, 2005.

Digital Library

[12]

S. Dolev, A. Israeli, and S. Moran. Uniform dynamic self-stabilizing leader election. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst., 8 (4): 424--440, 1997. ISSN 1045-9219.

Digital Library

[13]

Erlang 5.5/OTP R11B. The Erlang/OTP Team. http://www.erlang.org/doc/doc-5.5/doc/highlights.html.

[14]

J.-C. Fernandez, H. Garavel, A. Kerbrat, L. Mounier, R. Mateescu, and M. Sighireanu. CADP: A protocol validation and verification toolbox. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Computer-Aided Verification, volume 1102 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 437--440. Springer, 1996.

Digital Library

[15]

L. Fredlund. A Framework for Reasoning about Erlang Code. PhD thesis, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, 2001.

[16]

L. Fredlund. Implementing WS-CDL. In Proceedings of the second Spanish workshop on Web Technologies (JSWEB 2006). Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, November 2006.

[17]

L. Fredlund and J. J. Sánchez Penas. Model checking a VoD server using McErlang. In In proceedings of the 2007 Eurocast conference, Feb 2007.

Digital Library

[18]

L. Fredlund, D. Gurov, T. Noll, M. Dam, T. Arts, and G. Chugunov. A verification tool for Erlang. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT), 4 (4): 405--420, Aug 2003.

[19]

P. Godefroid. Verisoft: A tool for the automatic analysis of concurrent reactive software. In Computer Aided Verification, pages 476--479, 1997.

Digital Library

[20]

G. Holzmann. Design and Validation of Computer Protocols. Prentice-Hall, 1991.

Digital Library

[21]

G. Holzmann, D. Peled, and M. Yannakakis. On nested depth first search. In Proc. Second SPIN Workshop, pages 23--32. American Mathematical Society, 1996.

[22]

G. J. Holzmann and M. H. Smith. An automated verification method for distributed systems software based on model extraction. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 28 (4): 364--377, 2002. ISSN 0098-5589.

Digital Library

[23]

F. Huch. Verification of Erlang programs using abstract interpretation and model checking. In Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, 1999.

Digital Library

[24]

N. Lynch. Distributed Algorithms. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1996.

Digital Library

[25]

G. Singh. Leader election in the presence of link failures. In IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol 7. IEEE computer society, 1996.

Digital Library

[26]

I. Stoica, R. Morris, D. Karger, F. Kaashoek, and H. Balakrishnan. Chord: A scalable Peer-To-Peer lookup service for internet applications. In Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, pages 149--160, 2001. citeseer.ist.psu.edu/stoica01chord.html.

Digital Library

[27]

S. D. Stoller. Leader election in distributed systems with crash failures. Technical Report 481, Computer Science Dept., Indiana University, May 1997. Revised July 1997.

[28]

S. Torstendahl. Open telecom platform. Ericsson Review, 1, 1997.

[29]

M. Y. Vardi and P. Wolper. An automata-theoretic approach to automatic program verification. pages 332--344, 1986.

[30]

W3C. Web Services Choreography Description Language, Version 1.0 - W3C candidate recommendation 9 november 2005. Technical report, W3C, November 2005.

[31]

U. Wiger. Fault tolerant leader election. small http://www.erlang.org/.

[32]

A.G. Wouters. Manual for the μCRL toolset. Technical report, CWI, Amsterdam, 2001.

[33]

J. Yang, P. Twohey, D. Engler, and M. Musuvathi. Using model checking to find serious file system errors. In Sixth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, pages 273--288. USENIX, 2004.

Digital Library

Cited By

De Nicola RDuong TLoreti M(2020)Provably correct implementation of the AbC calculusScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2020.102567(102567)Online publication date: Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2020.102567
De Nicola RDuong TInverso OTrubiani C(2018)AErlang: Empowering Erlang with attribute-based communicationScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2018.08.006168(71-93)Online publication date: Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2018.08.006
Caballero RMartin-Martin ERiesco ATamarit S(2018)Declarative debugging of concurrent Erlang programsJournal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming10.1016/j.jlamp.2018.07.005101(22-41)Online publication date: Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlamp.2018.07.005
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

McErlang: a model checker for a distributed functional programming language
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods
        Model checking
2. Theory of computation
  1. Logic
    1. Verification by model checking

Recommendations

McErlang: a model checker for a distributed functional programming language
ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

We present a model checker for verifying distributed programs written in the Erlang programming language. Providing a model checker for Erlang is especially rewarding since the language is by now being seen as a very capable platform for developing ...
Analysing timed Rebeca using McErlang
AGERE! 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 workshop on Programming based on actors, agents, and decentralized control

Although timed actor-based models attracted more attention in the recent years, there is not much done on analyzing and model checking of such systems. The actor based language, Timed Rebeca, was introduced to model distributed and asynchronous systems ...
Recent improvements to the McErlang model checker
ERLANG '09: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on ERLANG

In this paper we describe a number of recent improvements to the McErlang model checker, including a new source to source translation to enable more Erlang programs to work under McErlang, a methodology for writing properties that can be verified by ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 9

Proceedings of the ICFP '07 conference

September 2007

331 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1291220

Issue’s Table of Contents

ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
October 2007
346 pages
ISBN:9781595938152
DOI:10.1145/1291151
General Chair:
Ralf Hinze
Universität Bonn, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Norman Ramsey
Harvard University, USA

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 October 2007

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 42, Issue 9

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

71
Total Citations
View Citations
550
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)18
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 25 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

De Nicola RDuong TLoreti M(2020)Provably correct implementation of the AbC calculusScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2020.102567(102567)Online publication date: Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2020.102567
De Nicola RDuong TInverso OTrubiani C(2018)AErlang: Empowering Erlang with attribute-based communicationScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2018.08.006168(71-93)Online publication date: Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2018.08.006
Caballero RMartin-Martin ERiesco ATamarit S(2018)Declarative debugging of concurrent Erlang programsJournal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming10.1016/j.jlamp.2018.07.005101(22-41)Online publication date: Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlamp.2018.07.005
Lanese INishida NPalacios AVidal G(2018)CauDEr: A Causal-Consistent Reversible Debugger for ErlangFunctional and Logic Programming10.1007/978-3-319-90686-7_16(247-263)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90686-7_16
Shibanai KWatanabe TDe Koster JBergenti F(2017)Actoverse: a reversible debugger for actorsProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control10.1145/3141834.3141840(50-57)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3141834.3141840
(2016)Statistical model checking of Timed Rebeca modelsComputer Languages, Systems and Structures10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.00445:C(53-79)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.004
Charousset DHiesgen RSchmidt T(2016)Revisiting actor programming in C++Computer Languages, Systems and Structures10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.00245:C(105-131)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.002
Stievenart QNicolay JDe Meuter WDe Roover CFalaschi MAlbert E(2015)Detecting concurrency bugs in higher-order programs through abstract interpretationProceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming10.1145/2790449.2790530(232-243)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2790449.2790530
Baouya ABennouar DMohamed OOuchani S(2015)A quantitative verification framework of SysML activity diagrams under time constraintsExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2015.05.04942:21(7493-7510)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2015.05.049
Nilsson ACastro LRivas SArts T(2015)Assessing the effects of introducing a new software development processInternational Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT)10.1007/s10009-013-0275-017:1(1-16)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10009-013-0275-0
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents