Automated verification of practical garbage collectors

DOI10.1145/1480881.1480935MaRDI QIDQ5261539zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors 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)

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

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)

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.

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(8)

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• A verified generational garbage collector for CakeML
• Automated verification of practical garbage collectors
• Reasoning about memory layouts
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• Practical Tactics for Separation Logic
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1670550 (Why is no real title available?)

Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• Boogie
• z3

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