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Outlawing ghosts: avoiding out-of-thin-air results

Authors:

Brian DemskyAuthors Info & Claims

MSPC '14: Proceedings of the workshop on Memory Systems Performance and Correctness

Article No.: 7, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/2618128.2618134

Published: 13 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

It is very difficult to define a programming language memory model for shared variables that both

• allows programmers to take full advantage of weakly-ordered memory operations, but still

• correctly disallows so-called "out-of-thin-air" results, i.e. results that can be justified only via reasoning that is in some sense circular.

Real programming language implementations do not produce out-of-thin-air results. Architectural specifications successfully disallow them. Nonetheless, the difficulty of disallowing them in language specifications causes real, and serious, problems. In the absence of such a specification, essentially all precise reasoning about non-trivial programs becomes impractical. This remains a critical open problem in the specifications of Java, C, and C++, among others.

We argue that there are plausible and relatively straight-forward solutions, but their performance impact requires further study. In the long run, they are likely to require strengthening of some hardware guarantees, so that they translate properly to guarantees at the programming language source level.

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Cited By

Nagar KSahoo AChowdhury RJagannathan S(2024)Automated Robustness Verification of Concurrent Data Structure Libraries against Relaxed Memory ModelsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36898028:OOPSLA2(2578-2605)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689802
Lee SCho MMargalit RHur CLahav O(2023)Putting Weak Memory in Order via a Promising Intermediate RepresentationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912977:PLDI(1872-1895)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591297
Singh ALahav O(2023)An Operational Approach to Library Abstraction under Relaxed Memory ConcurrencyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35712467:POPL(1542-1572)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571246
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Outlawing ghosts: avoiding out-of-thin-air results
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

MSPC '14: Proceedings of the workshop on Memory Systems Performance and Correctness

June 2014

61 pages

ISBN:9781450329170

DOI:10.1145/2618128

General Chair:
Jeremy Singer
University of Glasgow
,
Program Chairs:
Milind Kulkarni
Purdue University
,
Tim Harris
Oracle Labs

Copyright © 2014 Owner/Author.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 13 June 2014

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PLDI '14

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SIGPLAN

PLDI '14: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 13, 2014

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

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MSPC '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 6 of 20 submissions, 30%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6 of 20 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Nagar KSahoo AChowdhury RJagannathan S(2024)Automated Robustness Verification of Concurrent Data Structure Libraries against Relaxed Memory ModelsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36898028:OOPSLA2(2578-2605)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689802
Lee SCho MMargalit RHur CLahav O(2023)Putting Weak Memory in Order via a Promising Intermediate RepresentationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912977:PLDI(1872-1895)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591297
Singh ALahav O(2023)An Operational Approach to Library Abstraction under Relaxed Memory ConcurrencyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35712467:POPL(1542-1572)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571246
Jeffrey ARiely JBatty MCooksey SKaysin IPodkopaev A(2022)The leaky semicolon: compositional semantic dependencies for relaxed-memory concurrencyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34987166:POPL(1-30)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498716
Cook VPeterson CPainter ZDechev D(2022)Quantifiability: a concurrent correctness condition modeled in vector spaceComputing10.1007/s00607-022-01092-3105:5(955-978)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-022-01092-3
Luo WDemsky BSherwood TBerger EKozyrakis C(2021)C11Tester: a race detector for C/C++ atomicsProceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3445814.3446711(630-646)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3445814.3446711
Margalit RLahav O(2021)Verifying observational robustness against a c11-style memory modelProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34342855:POPL(1-33)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3434285
Moiseenko EPodkopaev AKoznov D(2021)A Survey of Programming Language Memory ModelsProgramming and Computer Software10.1134/S036176882106005047:6(439-456)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1134/S0361768821060050
Dokulil J(2021)Let’s Put the Memory Model Front and Center When Teaching Parallel Programming in C++2021 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)10.1109/IPDPSW52791.2021.00057(315-320)Online publication date: Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPSW52791.2021.00057
Jagadeesan RJeffrey ARiely J(2020)Pomsets with preconditions: a simple model of relaxed memoryProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282624:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428262
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