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International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

TACAS 2021: Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems pp 449–467Cite as

General Decidability Results for Asynchronous Shared-Memory Programs: Higher-Order and Beyond

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 12651)

Abstract

The model of asynchronous programming arises in many contexts, from low-level systems software to high-level web programming. We take a language-theoretic perspective and show general decidability and undecidability results for asynchronous programs that capture all known results as well as show decidability of new and important classes. As a main consequence, we show decidability of safety, termination and boundedness verification for higher-order asynchronous programs—such as OCaml programs using Lwt—and undecidability of liveness verification already for order-2 asynchronous programs. We show that under mild assumptions, surprisingly, safety and termination verification of asynchronous programs with handlers from a language class are decidable iff emptiness is decidable for the underlying language class. Moreover, we show that configuration reachability and liveness (fair termination) verification are equivalent, and decidability of these problems implies decidability of the well-known “equal-letters” problem on languages. Our results close the decidability frontier for asynchronous programs.

Keywords

  • Higher-order asynchronous programs
  • Decidability

This research was sponsored in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project 389792660 TRR 248–CPEC and by the European Research Council under the Grant Agreement 610150 (ERC Synergy Grant ImPACT).

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam & Georg Zetzsche

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  1. Rupak Majumdar
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  2. Ramanathan S. Thinniyam
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  3. Georg Zetzsche
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Correspondence to Ramanathan S. Thinniyam .

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Majumdar, R., Thinniyam, R.S., Zetzsche, G. (2021). General Decidability Results for Asynchronous Shared-Memory Programs: Higher-Order and Beyond. In: Groote, J.F., Larsen, K.G. (eds) Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. TACAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12651. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72016-2_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72016-2_24

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