coyote VS P

ex: https://github.com/microsoft/coyote/blob/main/Samples/Accoun...

Microsoft has a library/tool called Coyote* that helps with testing distributed systems; you can write tests/specifications, Coyote will systematically explore nondeterminism in your system and check if your tests still pass. If there's a failure, it'll show the sequence of events that led to the failing test.

I started a project to implement Raft with a KV-store on top, similar to the article, meaning to use Coyote to test it; I didn't get that far before losing interest, though. It's reassuring to read that it took Phil several months to write the code in the post, it's good to know that this is a decidedly nontrivial problem.

* https://github.com/microsoft/coyote

Something like coyote by MS?

If you're looking for similar concurrency testing in the dotnet world, checkout Coyote:

https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/

https://innovation.microsoft.com/en-us/exploring-project-coy...

MS provides a framework for testing for concurrency issues: https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/.

I suggest you try Microsoft Coyote

Visualizations do help a lot when model checkers and concurrency schedule exploration tools like Coyote find bugs. Coyote include the ability to visualize the traces if you express your concurrency using actors (see https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/#concepts/actors/state-ma...)

It also allows you to implement your own "logger" through which you can emit enough information to construct some cool visualizations. I had a lot of fun working on visualizing an implementation of Paxos using Coyote (then P#) (screenshot at https://ibb.co/TTk2hYb)

If curious, you can learn more in the Coyote website https://microsoft.github.io/coyote

Hi HN,

The tweet links to a couple of tutorials showing how to test an extremely simple CRUD service using Coyote to find concurrency bugs. Developers write simple unit tests whose concurrency is explored by Coyote to find bugs. You might be surprised to learn how we can write a number of interesting concurrency tests for even the simplest of CRUD services.

https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/#tutorials/first-concurre...

I worked on a state machine framework in another language, and have definitely have found less terse to be pretty good. Typing a few extra characters isn't that bad, especially if it makes some awful bit of evented code easier for someone to understand.

Of the things available open source, I think P-lang is pretty cool: https://github.com/p-org/P/blob/master/Tutorial/1_ClientServ...

Your proposed syntax reminded me of https://p-org.github.io/P/

I’ve gotten a lot of good about TLA+ and the more recent the P language has been really promising lately. It’s got a good pedigree and is being increasingly used as AWS as well.

I tried to use TLA+ but what annoys me the most is the disconnection between the actual implementation and its code. I think the P language has a much better future just because it can generate code that works: https://github.com/p-org/P

It is tough.

My approach when learning new protocols like Raft or Paxos is to implement them in Pluscal (TLA+'s higher-level language) or P (https://github.com/p-org/P). I've found that helps separate the protocol-level concerns from the implementation-level concerns (sockets? wire format?) in a way that reduces the difficulty of learning the protocol.