tlaplus VS FStar

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https://github.com/tlaplus/tlaplus/blob/master/tlatools/org....

In any case, our whole team thinks TLA is great, and we're happy people like you and Ron find it so useful and insightful. We also think it is a very insightful.

There are no tests! There are various ways to test concurrent data structures. You could use a stress test, where you spawn a lot of threads and let them mutate the map in a random way and then check the consistency of the map and some invariants. You could learn TLA+ and write a formal model of the map and then verify it.

Dafny and Whiley are two examples with explicit verification support. Idris and other dependently typed languages should all be rich enough to express the required predicate but might not necessarily be able to accept a reasonable implementation as proof. Isabelle, Lean, Coq, and other theorem provers definitely can express the capability but aren't going to churn out much in the way of executable programs; they're more useful to guide an implementation in a more practical functional language but then the proof is separated from the implementation, and you could also use tools like TLA+.

https://dafny.org/

https://whiley.org/

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://isabelle.in.tum.de/

https://leanprover.github.io/

https://coq.inria.fr/

http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html

I wish something like Lamport's TLA+ (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html) was supported in modern language compilers - perhaps with annotations/macros and a mini formal DSL.

Checking the invariant with assert is also useful in my limited experience with concurrency.

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html

One advantage of formal methods is in determining "what was expected" (including all the goofy edge cases) without having to burrow into the details of code.

Take a look at Alloy (http://alloytools.org/) and TLA+ (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html) for example. (Or even the ancient Z ("Zed") notation (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15819/zedbook.pdf)).

The pcal generator does *not* generate a definition for the set of labels. However, some users have suggested to add such a feature: https://github.com/tlaplus/tlaplus/issues/613

I don't think something that specific exists. There are a very large number of formal methods tools, each with different specialties / domains.

For verification with proof assistants, [Software Foundations](https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/) and [Concrete Semantics](http://concrete-semantics.org/) are both solid.

For verification via model checking, you can check out [Learn TLA+](https://learntla.com/), and the more theoretical [Specifying Systems](https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/book-02-08-08.pdf).

For more theory, check out [Formal Reasoning About Programs](http://adam.chlipala.net/frap/).

And for general projects look at [F*](https://www.fstar-lang.org/) and [Dafny](https://dafny.org/).

Don't get me wrong, there are times when Microsoft got it right the first time that was technically far superior to their competitors. Windows IOCP was theoretically capable of doing C10K as far back in 1994-95 when there wasn't any hardware support yet and UNIX world was bickering over how to do asynchronous I/O. Years later POSIX came up with select which was a shoddy little shit in comparison. Linux caved in finally only as recently as 2019 and implemented io_uring. Microsoft research has contributed some very interesting things to computer science like Z3 SAT solver and in collaboration with INRIA made languages like F* and Low* for formal specification and verification. But all this dwarfs in comparison to all the harm they did.

Most of the proof assistants out there: Lean, Coq, Dafny, Isabelle, F*, Idris 2, and Agda. And the main concepts are dependent types, Homotopy Type Theory AKA HoTT, and Category Theory. Warning: HoTT and Category Theory are really dense, you're going to really need to research them.

F* is a dependently typed language that can be transpiled to idiomatic C via the KReMLin compiler. It’s very ML-ish to write and you can leave out some proofs. It also has the benefit of being used to write a formally verified TLS implementation that’s in wide use throughout industry.

As I said, dependent types attempt to solve this problem. F* is a language where you can express complex logic as a type. The catch is, these types are checked by an SMT solver. If the solver can satisfy the type checking, then great, and you move on. If it can’t, you have no idea why, and either have to guess or manually write the proof anyway. Contrast this with Standard ML which has a proof of the soundness of its type system.

So kind of like F*? https://www.fstar-lang.org/

F*

Nevermind that academia has come up with far safer ways to do a few things but social norms & inertia prevent their wider adoption (well okay, it also has a barrier to entry in the education required to use it but I don't think someone with the knowledge to meaningfully contribute to an OS kernel can be considered uneducated nor unable to learn).

Maybe that's a little off topic here, but if you like fixing bugs, i suspect you might also enjoy showing that there are no bugs at all. Check out languages like F* https://www.fstar-lang.org/ It's a proof-oriented programming language. You can use it to write code that has no bugs at all. And you once you're done, can convert F* to C or other languages.