Context-Dependent Effects and Concurrency in Guarded Interaction Trees

TL;DR

This paper extends Guarded Interaction Trees to handle context-dependent effects like call/cc and shift/reset, providing formal reasoning, denotational semantics, and concurrency support for higher-order programming languages.

Contribution

It introduces a conservative extension of Guarded Interaction Trees for context-dependent effects, maintaining existing reasoning principles while enabling formal analysis and concurrency.

Findings

Provides denotational semantics for call/cc and delimited continuations.

Extends program logic to reason about context-dependent effects.

Demonstrates type soundness for effect interoperability.

Abstract

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 For example, the so-called ``bind rule'' in modern program logics is no longer valid.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.