Automated verification of practical garbage collectors

DOI10.1145/1480881.1480935zbMATH Open1315.68096arXiv1004.3808OpenAlexW2137484994MaRDI QIDQ5261539FDOQ5261539

Chris Hawblitzel, Erez Petrank

Publication date: 3 July 2015

Published in: Proceedings of the 36th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Garbage collectors are notoriously hard to verify, due to their low-level interaction with the underlying system and the general difficulty in reasoning about reachability in graphs. Several papers have presented verified collectors, but either the proofs were hand-written or the collectors were too simplistic to use on practical applications. In this work, we present two mechanically verified garbage collectors, both practical enough to use for real-world C# benchmarks. The collectors and their associated allocators consist of x86 assembly language instructions and macro instructions, annotated with preconditions, postconditions, invariants, and assertions. We used the Boogie verification generator and the Z3 automated theorem prover to verify this assembly language code mechanically. We provide measurements comparing the performance of the verified collector with that of the standard Bartok collectors on off-the-shelf C# benchmarks, demonstrating their competitiveness.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1004.3808

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zbMATH Keywords

verificationgarbage collection

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Mathematical aspects of software engineering (specification, verification, metrics, requirements, etc.) (68N30) Specification and verification (program logics, model checking, etc.) (68Q60)

Cited In (7)

• Verifying a concurrent garbage collector with a rely-guarantee methodology
• A verified generational garbage collector for CakeML
• A verified generational garbage collector for CakeML
• Reasoning about memory layouts
• Practical Tactics for Separation Logic
• Verifying a concurrent garbage collector using a rely-guarantee methodology
• Title not available (Why is that?)

Uses Software

• z3
• Boogie

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