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A Guide to Rely/Guarantee Thinking

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Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems (SETSS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11174))

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Abstract

Designing concurrent shared-variable programs is difficult. The Rely-Guarantee concept provides a compositional approach to the challenge. This paper reviews some recent developments in the approach, offers worked examples and relates the approach to other research.

This work was supported by Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project DP130102901 and the UK EPSRC “Taming Concurrency” and “Strata” research grants.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This operator was originally devised by us to allow guarantees to be expressed as a separate command, which is then combined with the rest of the specification using weak conjunction. Weak conjunction has since found wider use as a general composition operator.

  2. 2.

    For brevity, it is assumed here that \(Pr(x)\) is always defined—undefinedness is considered in [CJ07] but it has little bearing on the concurrency aspects of the application.

  3. 3.

    Generalising to an arbitrary number of threads presents no conceptual difficulties but also offers no further insight.

  4. 4.

    As observed in Sect. 1.3, achieving rely and/or guarantee conditions is often linked with data reification, for instance, viewing \(min\{ot, et\}\) as a representation of the abstract variable t.

  5. 5.

    Compare Law 17 (introduce-multi-parallel) and Law 16 (introduce-parallel) in Sect. 2.7.

  6. 6.

    Published as a book [Mid93].

  7. 7.

    SAGL [FFS07] has a similar scope.

  8. 8.

    The negative flavour of this adjective was probably intentional.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant DP130102901 “Understanding concurrent programs using rely-guarantee thinking” and the UK EPSRC “Taming Concurrency” and “Strata” research grants. Thanks are due to Robert Colvin, Diego Machado Dias, Larissa Meinicke, Patrick Meiring, Andrius Velykis, Kirsten Winter and Nisansala Yatapanage for feedback on ideas presented in this paper. The authors are particularly grateful to the anonymous reviewers for detailed and constructive comments.

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  1. School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Ian J. Hayes

  2. School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Cliff B. Jones

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    Jonathan P. Bowen

  2. Southwest University, Chongqing, China

    Zhiming Liu

  3. Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

    Zili Zhang

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Hayes, I.J., Jones, C.B. (2018). A Guide to Rely/Guarantee Thinking. In: Bowen, J., Liu, Z., Zhang, Z. (eds) Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems. SETSS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11174. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02928-9_1

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