arXiv subjects

Mark Batty

Publications and source records attributed to Mark Batty.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Spegion: Implicit and Non-Lexical Regions with Sized Allocations

Region based memory management is a powerful tool designed with the goal of ensuring memory safety statically. The region calculus of Tofte and Talpin is a well known example of a region based system, which uses regions to manage memory in a stack-like fashion. However, the region calculus is lexically scoped and requires explicit annotation of memory regions, which can be cumbersome for the programmer. Other systems have addressed non-lexical regions, but these approaches typically require the use of a substructural type system to track the lifetimes of regions. We present Spegion, a language with implicit non-lexical regions, which provides these same memory safety guarantees for programs that go beyond using memory allocation in a stack-like manner. We are able to achieve this with a concise syntax, and without the use of substructural types, relying instead on an effect system to enforce constraints on region allocation and deallocation. These regions may be divided into sub-regions, i.e., Splittable rEgions, allowing fine grained control over memory allocation. Furthermore, Spegion permits sized allocations, where each value has an associated size which is used to ensure that regions are not over-allocated into. We present a type system for Spegion and prove it is type safe with respect to a small-step operational semantics.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2024

Memory Consistency and Program Transformations

A memory consistency model specifies the allowed behaviors of shared memory concurrent programs. At the language level, these models are known to have a non-trivial impact on the safety of program optimizations, limiting the ability to rearrange/refactor code without introducing new behaviors. Existing programming language memory models try to address this by permitting more (relaxed/weak) concurrent behaviors but are still unable to allow all the desired optimizations. A core problem is that weaker consistency models may also render optimizations unsafe, a conclusion that goes against the intuition of them allowing more behaviors. This exposes an open problem of the compositional interaction between memory consistency semantics and optimizations: which parts of the semantics correspond to allowing/disallowing which set of optimizations is unclear. In this work, we establish a formal foundation suitable enough to understand this compositional nature, decomposing optimizations into a finite set of elementary effects on program execution traces, over which aspects of safety can be assessed. We use this decomposition to identify a desirable compositional property (complete) that would guarantee the safety of optimizations from one memory model to another. We showcase its practicality by proving such a property between Sequential Consistency (SC) and $SC_{RR}$, the latter allowing independent read-read reordering over $SC$. Our work potentially paves way to a new design methodology of programming-language memory models, one that places emphasis on the optimizations desired to be performed.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2021

Owicki-Gries Reasoning for C11 Programs with Relaxed Dependencies (Extended Version)

Deductive verification techniques for C11 programs have advanced significantly in recent years with the development of operational semantics and associated logics for increasingly large fragments of C11. However, these semantics and logics have been developed in a restricted setting to avoid the thin-air-read problem. In this paper, we propose an operational semantics that leverages an intra-thread partial order (called semantic dependencies) induced by a recently developed denotational event-structure-based semantics. We prove that our operational semantics is sound and complete with respect to the denotational semantics. We present an associated logic that generalises a recent Owicki-Gries framework for RC11 (repaired C11), and demonstrate the use of this logic over several example proofs.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2018

PrideMM: A Solver for Relaxed Memory Models

Relaxed memory models are notoriously delicate. To ease their study, several ad hoc simulators have been developed for axiomatic memory models. We show how axiomatic memory models can be simulated using a solver for $\exists$SO. Further, we show how memory models based on event structures can be simulated using a solver for MSO. Finally, we present a solver for SO, built on top of QBF solvers.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2018

Compositional Verification of Compiler Optimisations on Relaxed Memory

A valid compiler optimisation transforms a block in a program without introducing new observable behaviours to the program as a whole. Deciding which optimisations are valid can be difficult, and depends closely on the semantic model of the programming language. Axiomatic relaxed models, such as C++11, present particular challenges for determining validity, because such models allow subtle effects of a block transformation to be observed by the rest of the program. In this paper we present a denotational theory that captures optimisation validity on an axiomatic model corresponding to a fragment of C++11. Our theory allows verifying an optimisation compositionally, by considering only the block it transforms instead of the whole program. Using this property, we realise the theory in the first push-button tool that can verify real-world optimisations under an axiomatic memory model.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2015

Overhauling SC Atomics in C11 and OpenCL

Despite the conceptual simplicity of sequential consistency (SC), the semantics of SC atomic operations and fences in the C11 and OpenCL memory models is subtle, leading to convoluted prose descriptions that translate to complex axiomatic formalisations. We conduct an overhaul of SC atomics in C11, reducing the associated axioms in both number and complexity. A consequence of our simplification is that the SC operations in an execution no longer need to be totally ordered. This relaxation enables, for the first time, efficient and exhaustive simulation of litmus tests that use SC atomics. We extend our improved C11 model to obtain the first rigorous memory model formalisation for OpenCL (which extends C11 with support for heterogeneous many-core programming). In the OpenCL setting, we refine the SC axioms still further to give a sensible semantics to SC operations that employ a 'memory scope' to restrict their visibility to specific threads. Our overhaul requires slight strengthenings of both the C11 and the OpenCL memory models, causing some behaviours to become disallowed. We argue that these strengthenings are natural, and that all of the formalised C11 and OpenCL compilation schemes of which we are aware (Power and x86 CPUs for C11, AMD GPUs for OpenCL) remain valid in our revised models. Using the Herd memory model simulator, we show that our overhaul leads to an exponential improvement in simulation time for C11 litmus tests compared with the original model, making exhaustive simulation competitive, time-wise, with the non-exhaustive CDSChecker tool.

cs.PL↗