Abstract
Modern concurrent algorithms are usually encapsulated in libraries, and complex algorithms are often constructed using libraries of simpler ones. We present the first theorem that allows harnessing this structure to give compositional liveness proofs to concurrent algorithms and their clients. We show that, while proving a liveness property of a client using a concurrent library, we can soundly replace the library by another one related to the original library by a generalisation of a well-known notion of linearizability. We apply this result to show formally that lock-freedom, an often-used liveness property of non-blocking algorithms, is compositional for linearizable libraries, and provide an example illustrating our proof technique.
We would like to thank Anindya Banerjee, Aleks Nanevski, Matthew Parkinson and Viktor Vafeiadis for helpful comments and suggestions. Yang was supported by EPSRC.
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Gotsman, A., Yang, H. (2011). Liveness-Preserving Atomicity Abstraction. In: Aceto, L., Henzinger, M., Sgall, J. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6756. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22012-8_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22012-8_36
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