Some Challenges of Specifying Concurrent Program Components

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges in formally specifying shared-memory concurrent program components, focusing on atomicity, blocking, progress, and transactional operations, to aid both clients and implementation refinement.

Contribution

It introduces approaches for creating abstract specifications suitable for various contexts, addressing atomicity, blocking, progress, and transactional failures in concurrent components.

Findings

Proposes different specification forms for concurrent components

Addresses atomicity and blocking in shared-memory systems

Explores handling transactional retries in specifications

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to address some of the challenges of formally specifying components of shared-memory concurrent programs. The focus is to provide an abstract specification of a component that is suitable for use both by clients of the component and as a starting point for refinement to an implementation of the component. We present some approaches to devising specifications, investigating different forms suitable for different contexts. We examine handling atomicity of access to data structures, blocking operations and progress properties, and transactional operations that may fail and need to be retried.