research-article

Immutable specifications for more concise and precise verification

Authors:

Cristina David,

Wei-Ngan ChinAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 46, Issue 10

Pages 359 - 374

https://doi.org/10.1145/2076021.2048096

Published: 22 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

In the current work, we investigate the benefits of immutability guarantees for allowing more flexible handling of aliasing, as well as more precise and concise specifications. Our approach supports finer levels of control that can mark data structures as being immutable through the use of immutability annotations. By using such annotations to encode immutability guarantees, we expect to obtain better specifications that can more accurately describe the intentions, as well as prohibitions, of the method. Ultimately, our goal is improving the precision of the verification process, as well as making the specifications more readable, more precise and as an enforceable program documentation. We have designed and implemented a new entailment procedure to formally and automatically reason about immutability enhanced specifications. We have also formalised the soundness for our new procedure through an operational semantics with mutability assertions on the heap. Lastly, we have carried out a set of experiments to both validate and affirm the utility of our current proposal on immutability enhanced specification mechanism.

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Cited By

Illous HLemerre MRival X(2021)A relational shape abstract domainFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-021-00366-4Online publication date: 24-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-021-00366-4
Costea AZhu APolikarpova NSergey I(2020)Concise Read-Only Specifications for Better Synthesis of Programs with PointersProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_6(141-168)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_6
Sharma AHobor AChin W(2015)Specifying Compatible Sharing in Data StructuresFormal Methods and Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_23(349-365)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_23
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Immutable specifications for more concise and precise verification

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 10

OOPSLA '11

October 2011

1063 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2076021

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
October 2011
1104 pages
ISBN:9781450309400
DOI:10.1145/2048066
General Chair:
Cristina Videira Lopes
University of California, Irvine, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kathleen Fisher
Tufts University, USA

Copyright © 2011 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]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2011

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 46, Issue 10

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Cited By

Illous HLemerre MRival X(2021)A relational shape abstract domainFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-021-00366-4Online publication date: 24-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-021-00366-4
Costea AZhu APolikarpova NSergey I(2020)Concise Read-Only Specifications for Better Synthesis of Programs with PointersProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_6(141-168)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_6
Sharma AHobor AChin W(2015)Specifying Compatible Sharing in Data StructuresFormal Methods and Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_23(349-365)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_23
Foo DSong YChin W(2024)Staged Specification Logic for Verifying Higher-Order Imperative ProgramsFormal Methods10.1007/978-3-031-71162-6_26(501-518)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71162-6_26
Illous HLemerre MRival X(2021)A relational shape abstract domainFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-021-00366-4Online publication date: 24-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-021-00366-4
Kiss TCraciun FParv B(2015)Verification of protocol specifications with Separation Logic2015 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP)10.1109/ICCP.2015.7312614(109-116)Online publication date: Sep-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCP.2015.7312614
Sharma AHobor AChin W(2015)Specifying Compatible Sharing in Data StructuresFormal Methods and Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_23(349-365)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_23
Brotherston JVillard J(2014)Parametric completeness for separation theoriesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2578855.253584449:1(453-464)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2578855.2535844
Costea ASharma ADavid CChin WHage J(2014)HIPimmProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2014 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation10.1145/2543728.2543743(189-193)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2543728.2543743
Brotherston JVillard JJagannathan SSewell P(2014)Parametric completeness for separation theoriesProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/2535838.2535844(453-464)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2535838.2535844

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