Matching Plans

Matching Plans for Frame Inference in Compositional Reasoning

Authors

  • Andreas Lööw

  • Daniele Nantes-Sobrinho

  • Sacha-Élie Ayoun

  • Petar Maksimović

  • Philippa Gardner

Abstract

The use of function specifications to reason about function calls and the manipulation of user-defined predicates are two essential ingredients of modern compositional verification tools based on separation logic. To execute these operations successfully, these tools must be able to solve the frame inference problem, that is, to understand which parts of the state are relevant for the operation at hand. We introduce matching plans, a concept that is used in the Gillian verification platform to automate frame inference efficiently. We extract matching plans and their automation machinery from the Gillian implementation and present them in a tool-agnostic way, making the Gillian approach available to the broader verification community as a verification-tool design pattern.

Venue

European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP)

Year

2024

DOI