arXiv subjects

Amin Timany

Publications and source records attributed to Amin Timany.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Yarrow: Reconciling Effect Handlers and Region-Based Memory Management

We present a new ML-like programming language Yarrow with algebraic effects and region-based memory management. Reconciling these programming language features into one language is challenging: the non-local control flow of algebraic effects break the stack discipline of function calls and returns that region-based memory management relies on, and multi-shot effect handlers break the invariant that regions can be exited at most once. We present a program logic, called Yarrow Logic (YL), that supports safe and modular reasoning about regions in the presence of one-shot and multi-shot effect handlers. We prove the logic sound w.r.t. the operational semantics of Yarrow which is inspired by the runtime of OCaml but refined for regions. We use YL to prove correctness of a number of case studies with algebraic effects, including checkpointing, asynchronous computation and a LIFO data structure implementation. Since all memory locations used in these case studies are allocated in regions, these case studies avoid using the less efficient garbage collected heap memory. We have formalized Yarrow's operational semantics, the Yarrow program logic, and all our case studies using the Iris separation logic framework on top of the Rocq Prover.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2026

Verifying Isolation Levels of Database Implementations for Free Using Separation Logic

Modern databases are highly concurrent and provide transactions as a mean of grouping several database operations into atomically applied units. Database vendors and software engineers use isolation levels to describe the consistency guarantees of transactions. The popular isolation levels give weak guarantees, with intricate semantics, to optimize performance of applications. The problem of assuring that database implementations actually implement the isolation level guarantees that application developers build their systems upon has received a great deal of attention from the testing community. But until now, there exists no method for formally verifying that a database implementation actually implements the isolation level that database vendors says it provides. In this paper, we present a method for verifying that a database implements an isolation level: we derive isolation levels directly, as formalized in transactional consistency models by the database community, from the structure of separation logic specifications. By doing so, we consider all program executions that a database and arbitrary clients of the database could produce. The result is a so-called free theorem meaning that any database implementation, whose operations are verified against a specific set of separation logic specifications, actually implements its isolation level. As all proofs in this paper are mechanized in the Rocq proof assistant and build upon a detailed semantic model of program execution, we believe this contribution raises the bar for the achievable robustness of databases.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Context-Dependent Effects and Concurrency in Guarded Interaction Trees

Guarded Interaction Trees are a structure and a fully formalized framework for representing higher-order computations with higher-order effects in Rocq. We present an extension of Guarded Interaction Trees to support formal reasoning about context-dependent effects. That is, effects whose behaviors depend on the evaluation context, e.g., call/cc, shift and reset. Using and reasoning about such effects is challenging since certain compositionality principles no longer hold in the presence of such effects. For example, the so-called ``bind rule'' in modern program logics is no longer valid. The goal of our extension is to support representation and reasoning about context-dependent effects in the most painless way possible. To that end, our extension is conservative: the reasoning principles for context-independent effects remain the same. We use it to give direct-style denotational semantics for higher-order programming languages with call/cc and with delimited continuations. We extend the program logic for Guarded Interaction Trees to account for context-dependent effects, and we use the program logic to prove that the denotational semantics is adequate with respect to the operational semantics. Additionally, we retain the ability to combine multiple effects in a modular way, which we demonstrate by showing type soundness for safe interoperability of a programming language with delimited continuations and a programming language with higher-order store. Furthermore, as another contribution, in addition to context-dependent effects, we show how to extend Guarded Interaction Trees with preemptive concurrency. To support implementation and verification of concurrent data structures and algorithms in the presence of preemptive concurrency one requires atomic state modification operations, e.g., compare-and-exchange.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2025

Reasoning about Weak Isolation Levels in Separation Logic

Consistency guarantees among concurrently executing transactions in local- and distributed systems, commonly referred to as isolation levels, have been formalized in a number of models. Thus far, no model can reason about executable implementations of databases or local transaction libraries providing weak isolation levels. Weak isolation levels are characterized by being highly concurrent and, unlike their stronger counterpart serializability, they are not equivalent to the consistency guarantees provided by a transaction library implemented using a global lock. Industrial-strength databases almost exclusively implement weak isolation levels as their default level. This calls for formalism as numerous bugs violating isolation have been detected in these databases. In this paper, we formalize three weak isolation levels in separation logic, namely read uncommitted, read committed, and snapshot isolation. We define modular separation logic specifications that are independent of the underlying transaction library implementation. Historically, isolation levels have been specified using examples of executions between concurrent transactions that are not allowed to occur, and we demonstrate that our specifications correctly prohibit such examples. To show that our specifications are realizable, we formally verify that an executable implementation of a key-value database running the multi-version concurrency control algorithm from the original snapshot isolation paper satisfies our specification of snapshot isolation. Moreover, we prove implications between the specifications -- snapshot isolation implies read committed and read committed implies read uncommitted -- and thus the verification effort of the database serves as proof that all of our specifications are realizable. All results are mechanized in the Rocq proof assistant on top of the Iris separation logic framework.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2023

Modular Denotational Semantics for Effects with Guarded Interaction Trees

We present guarded interaction trees -- a structure and a fully formalized framework for representing higher-order computations with higher-order effects in Coq, inspired by domain theory and the recently proposed interaction trees. We also present an accompanying separation logic for reasoning about guarded interaction trees. To demonstrate that guarded interaction trees provide a convenient domain for interpreting higher-order languages with effects, we define an interpretation of a PCF-like language with effects and show that this interpretation is sound and computationally adequate; we prove the latter using a logical relation defined using the separation logic. Guarded interaction trees also allow us to combine different effects and reason about them modularly. To illustrate this point, we give a modular proof of type soundness of cross-language interactions for safe interoperability of different higher-order languages with different effects. All results in the paper are formalized in Coq using the Iris logic over guarded type theory.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2021

Trillium: Higher-Order Concurrent and Distributed Separation Logic for Intensional Refinement

Expressive state-of-the-art separation logics rely on step-indexing to model semantically complex features and to support modular reasoning about imperative higher-order concurrent and distributed programs. Step-indexing comes, however, with an inherent cost: it restricts the adequacy theorem of program logics to a fairly simple class of safety properties. In this paper, we explore if and how intensional refinement is a viable methodology for strengthening higher-order concurrent (and distributed) separation logic to prove non-trivial safety and liveness properties. Specifically, we introduce Trillium, a language-agnostic separation logic framework for showing intensional refinement relations between traces of a program and a model. We instantiate Trillium with a concurrent language and develop Fairis, a concurrent separation logic, that we use to show liveness properties of concurrent programs under fair scheduling assumptions through a fair liveness-preserving refinement of a model. We also instantiate Trillium with a distributed language and obtain an extension of Aneris, a distributed separation logic, which we use to show refinement relations between distributed systems and TLA+ models.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2020

A Separation Logic to Verify Termination of Busy-Waiting for Abrupt Program Exit

Programs for multiprocessor machines commonly perform busy-waiting for synchronisation. In this paper, we make a first step towards proving termination of such programs. We approximate (i) arbitrary waitable events by abrupt program termination and (ii) busy-waiting for events by busy-waiting to be abruptly terminated. We propose a separation logic for modularly verifying termination (under fair scheduling) of programs where some threads eventually abruptly terminate the program, and other threads busy-wait for this to happen.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2020

A Separation Logic to Verify Termination of Busy-Waiting for Abrupt Program Exit: Technical Report

cs.LO↗

arXiv2019

Abstract I/O Specification

We recently proposed an approach for the specification and modular formal verification of the interactive (I/O) behavior of programs, based on an embedding of Petri nets into separation logic. While this approach is scalable and modular in terms of the I/O APIs available to a program, enables composing low-level I/O actions into high-level ones, and enables a convenient verification experience, it does not support high-level I/O actions that involve memory manipulation as well as low-level I/O (such as buffered I/O), or that are in fact "virtual I/O" actions that are implemented purely through memory manipulation. Furthermore, it does not allow rewriting an I/O specification into an equivalent one. In this paper, we propose a refined approach that does have these properties. The essential insight is to fix the set of places of the Petri net to be the set of separation logic assertions, thus making available the full power of separation logic for abstractly stating an arbitrary operation's specification in Petri net form, for composing operations into an I/O specification, and for equivalence reasoning on I/O specifications. Our refinement resolves the issue of the justification of the choice of Petri nets over other formalisms such as general state transition systems, in that it "refines them away" into the more essential constructs of separating conjunction and abstract nested triples. To enable a convenient treatment of input operations, we propose the use of prophecy variables to eliminate their non-determinism. We illustrate the approach through a number of example programs, including one where subroutines specified and verified using I/O specifications run as threads communicating through shared memory. The theory and examples of the paper have been machine-checked using the Iris library for program verification in the Coq proof assistant.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2017

Consistency of the Predicative Calculus of Cumulative Inductive Constructions (pCuIC)

In order to avoid well-know paradoxes associated with self-referential definitions, higher-order dependent type theories stratify the theory using a countably infinite hierarchy of universes (also known as sorts), Type$_0$ : Type$_1$ : $\cdots$ . Such type systems are called cumulative if for any type $A$ we have that $A$ : Type$_{i}$ implies $A$ : Type$_{i+1}$. The predicative calculus of inductive constructions (pCIC) which forms the basis of the Coq proof assistant, is one such system. In this paper we present and establish the soundness of the predicative calculus of cumulative inductive constructions (pCuIC) which extends the cumulativity relation to inductive types.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2015

Category Theory in Coq 8.5

We report on our experience implementing category theory in Coq 8.5. The repository of this development can be found at https://bitbucket.org/amintimany/categories/. This implementation most notably makes use of features, primitive projections for records and universe polymorphism that are new to Coq 8.5.

cs.LO↗