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Reasoning About Weak Semantics via Strong Semantics

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Principled Software Development

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Abstract

Verification has to reason about the actual semantics of a program. The actual semantics not only depends on the source code but also on the environment: the target machine, the runtime system, and in the case of libraries the number of clients. So verification has to consider weak memory models, manual memory management, and arbitrarily many clients. Interestingly, most programs are insensitive to the environment. Programs are often well-behaved in that they appear to be executed under sequentially-consistent memory, garbage collection, and with few clients—although they are not. There is a correspondence between the actual semantics and an idealized much simpler variant. This suggests to carry out the verification in two steps. Check that the program is well-behaved. If so, perform the verification on the idealized semantics. Otherwise, report that the code is sensitive to the environment.

Arnd is one of the few researchers who is able to switch with ease between the practice of writing code and the theory of defining programming interfaces. Discussions with him had substantial influence on the above verification approach, which we started to develop in Kaiserslautern, two offices next to his. In this paper, we give a unified presentation of our findings.

Happy Birthday, Arnd!

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Roland Meyer & Sebastian Wolff

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  1. Roland Meyer
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  2. Sebastian Wolff
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Correspondence to Sebastian Wolff .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Peter Müller

  2. Institut für Softwaretechnik und Fahrzeuginformatik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Ina Schaefer

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Meyer, R., Wolff, S. (2018). Reasoning About Weak Semantics via Strong Semantics. In: Müller, P., Schaefer, I. (eds) Principled Software Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98047-8_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98047-8_18

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