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Slang: The Sireum Programming Language

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Book cover Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation (ISoLA 2021)

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Abstract

This paper presents design goals, development approaches, and applications for Slang – a subset of the Scala programming language designed for engineering high assurance safety/security-critical systems. Rationale is given for specializing Scala for Slang so as to retain Scala’s synergistic blend of imperative, functional, and object-oriented features while omitting and tailoring features that make formal verification and other analyses difficult. Strategies for enhancing the usability of Slang are discussed including integration with the broader Scala/JVM ecosystem, compilers, and development environments. A number of accompanying Slang tools are described including Slang scripting, meta-programming support, and translators to Javascript and native code that enable support for a wide range of deployment platforms. To support deployment on constrained embedded platforms, the Slang Embedded subset and an accompanying C translator generate efficient implementations that avoid garbage-collection and other aspects that hinder deployment and safety/security assurances. We conclude with a discussion of how our experiences with Slang may provide suggestions for the future of programming and programming language design for engineering critical systems.

Work supported in part by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, US Air Force Research Lab, US Army, and US Department of Homeland Security.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This does not preclude graph algorithms from being written in Slang; in fact, the Slang runtime library provides a graph library (used in [33]), including cycle detection (graphs are realized using indexed node pools with pairs of indices as edges).

  2. 2.

    Memory footprint optimizations in the Scala compiler plugin for Slang include flattening None into null and Some to its contained value internally for object fields, but optional values are used for field accesses.

  3. 3.

    A runtime contract checker (similar to [36]) can be developed in the future for testing purposes (or for contract enforcement with various mitigation options).

  4. 4.

    Aside from extensions in the Slang runtime library for file access (and spawning processes, OS detection, etc.), which are available on JVM and native targets.

  5. 5.

    We initially planned to offer C compilation with garbage collection, but GraalVM or Scala Native can be used instead. We may reconsider such approach in the future.

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  1. Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 66506, USA

    Robby & John Hatcliff

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  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Robby, Hatcliff, J. (2021). Slang: The Sireum Programming Language. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. ISoLA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13036. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89159-6_17

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