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Context-Aware Trace Contracts

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Active Object Languages: Current Research Trends

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14360))

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Abstract

The behavior of concurrent, asynchronous procedures depends in general on the call context, because of the global protocol that governs scheduling. This context cannot be specified with the state-based Hoare-style contracts common in deductive verification. Recent work generalized state-based to trace contracts, which permit to specify the internal behavior of a procedure, such as calls or state changes, but not its call context. In this article we propose a program logic of context-aware trace contracts for specifying global behavior of asynchronous programs. We also provide a sound proof system that addresses two challenges: To observe the program state not merely at the end points of a procedure, we introduce the novel concept of an observation quantifier. And to combat combinatorial explosion of possible call sequences of procedures, we transfer Liskov’s principle of behavioral subtyping to the analysis of asynchronous procedures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Additional specification elements, such as frames or exceptional behavior, can be considered as syntactic sugar to achieve concise post-conditions.

  2. 2.

    We do not add the value to be written as a parameter, again for simplicity. This can be easily modelled with a global variable, if desired.

  3. 3.

    Evaluation of a single process, in a known context.

  4. 4.

    The split between local and global is inspired by the LAGC semantics for Active Objects [14]. There are some technical differences between our semantics and LAGC, most prominently that both our local and global semantics are only defined on concrete traces: We do not evaluate symbolically.

  5. 5.

    This can be generalized as usual, if needed.

  6. 6.

    \(\lceil q_{a_m}\rceil \) and \(\lceil q_{c_m}\rceil \) correspond to \(\lceil Pre\rceil \) and \(\lceil Post\rceil \) above. Of course, it is redundant that these formulas occur twice in \(C_m\), but we want each part of a trace contract to be readable on its own.

  7. 7.

    In practice, this split shape must be obtained by suitable weakening rules on trace formulas. The details are future work.

  8. 8.

    This insight was used already in [19] to formulate a Liskov principle for feature-oriented programming.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway via the SIRIUS Centre (237898) and the PeTWIN project (294600), as well as the Hessian LOEWE initiative within the Software-Factory 4.0 project.

We profited enormously from the detailed and constructive remarks of the reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Reiner Hähnle & Marco Scaletta

  2. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Eduard Kamburjan

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  1. Reiner Hähnle
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Correspondence to Reiner Hähnle .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank de Boer

  2. University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Ferruccio Damiani

  3. Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany

    Reiner Hähnle

  4. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Einar Broch Johnsen

  5. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Eduard Kamburjan

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Hähnle, R., Kamburjan, E., Scaletta, M. (2024). Context-Aware Trace Contracts. In: de Boer, F., Damiani, F., Hähnle, R., Broch Johnsen, E., Kamburjan, E. (eds) Active Object Languages: Current Research Trends. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14360. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_11

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