Abstract
Separation Logic (SL) provides a simple but powerful technique for reasoning about imperative programs that use shared data structures. Unfortunately, SL supports only “strong updates”, in which mutation to a heap location is safe only if a unique reference is owned. This limits the applicability of SL when reasoning about the interaction between many high-level languages (e.g., ML, Java, C#) and low-level ones since these high-level languages do not support strong updates. Instead, they adopt the discipline of “weak updates”, in which there is a global “heap type” to enforce the invariant of type-preserving heap updates. We present SLw, a logic that extends SL with reference types and elegantly reasons about the interaction between strong and weak updates. We also describe a semantic framework for reference types; this framework is used to prove the soundness of SLw.
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Tan, G., Shao, Z., Feng, X., Cai, H. (2009). Weak updates and separation logic. In: Hu, Z. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5904. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10672-9_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10672-9_14
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