1,066 papers · page 4 of 54
What are mutable references; what do they mean? The answers to these questions have spawned lots of important theoretical work and form the foundation of many impactful tools. However, existing semantics collapse a key distinction: which allocations does a reference depend on? I…
We present a new approach to scaling exact inference for probabilistic programs, using generating functions (GFs) as a compilation target. Existing methods that target representations like binary decision diagrams (BDDs) achieve strong state-of-the-art results. We show that a com…
We present Coneris, the first *higher-order concurrent separation logic* for reasoning about error probability bounds of higher-order concurrent probabilistic programs with higher-order state. To support modular reasoning about concurrent (non-probabilistic) program modules, stat…
Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) are distributed data structures designed for fault tolerance and high availability. CRDTs have historically been taxonomized into state-based CRDTs, in which replicas apply updates locally and periodically broadcast their state to other…
In strict languages, laziness is typically modeled with explicit thunks that defer a computation until needed and memoize the result. Such thunks are implemented using a closure. Implementing lazy data structures using thunks thus has several disadvantages: closures cannot be pri…
Docker is a developer tool used by millions of developers to build, share and run software stacks. The Docker Desktop clients for Mac and Windows have long used a novel combination of virtualisation and OCaml unikernels to seamlessly run Linux containers on these non-Linux hosts.…
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 transacti…
A course on software specification deserves a prominent place in the undergraduate curriculum. This report describes our experience teaching a first-year course that places software specification front and center. In support of the course, we created a pedagogic programming langu…
While enabling use cases such as backtracking search and probabilistic programming, multiple resumptions have the reputation of being incompatible with efficient implementation techniques, such as stack switching. This paper sets out to resolve this conflict and thus bridge the g…
Accessing an arbitrary element of a singly linked list or cons list requires traversing up to a linear number of pointers. The applicative random-access list is a data structure that behaves like a cons list except that accessing an arbitrary element traverses only a logarithmic …
The past few years have seen a surge of interest in choreographic programming, a programming paradigm for concurrent and distributed systems. The paradigm allows programmers to implement a distributed interaction protocol with a single high-level program, called a choreography, a…
We introduce FuSes, a Functional programming language that integrates Session-typed concurrent process calculus code. A functional layer sits on top of a session-typed process layer. To generate and reason about open session-typed processes, the functional layer uses the contextu…
This paper makes a first step towards a formal definition of OCaml and a foundational program verification environment for OCaml. We present a formal definition of OLang, a nontrivial sequential fragment of OCaml, which includes first-class functions, ordinary and extensible alge…
In this paper we demonstrate a technique for developing high performance applications with strong correctness guarantees. Using a theorem prover, we derive a high-level specification of the application that includes correctness invariants of our choice. After that, within the sam…
Bidirectional transformations (BXs) are a widely adopted approach for data synchronisation that is usually based on two functions, one from the source to the view and one back. Traditionally, these functions must not have side effects. While a few frameworks aim to lift this rest…
Verification of higher-order probabilistic programs is a challenging problem. We present a verification method that supports several quantitative properties of higher-order probabilistic programs. Usually, extending verification methods to handle the quantitative aspects of proba…
Probabilistic programs often trade accuracy for efficiency, and thus may, with a small probability, return an incorrect result. It is important to obtain precise bounds for the probability of these errors, but existing verification approaches have limitations that lead to error p…
We say that an imperative data structure is snapshottable or supports snapshots if we can efficiently capture its current state, and restore a previously captured state to become the current state again. This is useful, for example, to implement backtracking search processes that…
Bahr and Hutton recently developed an approach to compiler calculation that allows a wide range of compilers to be derived from specifications of their correctness. However, a limitation of the approach is that it results in compilers that produce tree-structured code. By contras…
Implementations of domain-specific languages should offer both extensibility and performance optimizations. With the new syntax-spec metalanguage in Racket, programmers can easily create DSL implementations that are both automatically macro-extensible and subject to conventional …