Chris Hawblitzel ; Erez Petrank - Automated Verification of Practical Garbage Collectors

lmcs:1039 - Logical Methods in Computer Science, August 18, 2010, Volume 6, Issue 3 - https://doi.org/10.2168/LMCS-6(3:6)2010
Automated Verification of Practical Garbage CollectorsArticle

Authors: Chris Hawblitzel ; Erez Petrank

    Garbage collectors are notoriously hard to verify, due to their low-level interaction with the underlying system and the general difficulty in reasoning about reachability in graphs. Several papers have presented verified collectors, but either the proofs were hand-written or the collectors were too simplistic to use on practical applications. In this work, we present two mechanically verified garbage collectors, both practical enough to use for real-world C# benchmarks. The collectors and their associated allocators consist of x86 assembly language instructions and macro instructions, annotated with preconditions, postconditions, invariants, and assertions. We used the Boogie verification generator and the Z3 automated theorem prover to verify this assembly language code mechanically. We provide measurements comparing the performance of the verified collector with that of the standard Bartok collectors on off-the-shelf C# benchmarks, demonstrating their competitiveness.


    Volume: Volume 6, Issue 3
    Published on: August 18, 2010
    Imported on: October 13, 2009
    Keywords: Computer Science - Programming Languages
    Funding:
      Source : OpenAIRE Graph
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