Science of Computer Programming最新文献

{"title":"Verification of forward simulations with thread-local, step-local proof obligations","authors":"Gerhard Schellhorn,&nbsp;Stefan Bodenmüller,&nbsp;Wolfgang Reif","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103227","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103227","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper presents a proof technique for proving refinements for general state-based models of concurrent systems that reduces proving forward simulations to thread-local, step-local proof obligations. The approach has been implemented in our theorem prover KIV, which translates imperative programs to a set of transition rules and generates proof obligations accordingly. Instances of this proof technique should also be applicable to systems specified with ASM rules, B events, or Z operations. To exemplify the proof methodology, we demonstrate it with two case studies. The first verifies linearizability of a lock-free implementation of concurrent hash sets by showing that it refines an abstract concurrent system with atomic operations. The second applies the proof technique to the verification of opacity of Transactional Mutex Locks (TML), a Software Transactional Memory algorithm. Compared to the standard approach of proving a forward simulation directly, both case studies show a significant reduction in proof effort.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"241 ","pages":"Article 103227"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142660651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"API comparison based on the non-functional information mined from Stack Overflow","authors":"Zhiqi Chen ,&nbsp;Yuzhou Liu ,&nbsp;Lei Liu ,&nbsp;Huaxiao Liu ,&nbsp;Ren Li ,&nbsp;Peng Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103228","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103228","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>When comparing similar APIs, developers tend to distinguish them from the aspects of functional details. At the same time, some important non-functional factors (such as performance, usability, and security) may be ignored or noticed after using the API in the project. This may result in unnecessary errors or extra costs. API-related questions are common on Stack Overflow, and they can give a well-rounded picture of the APIs. This provides us with a rich resource for API comparison. However, although many methods are offered for mining Questions and Answers (Q&amp;As) automatically, they often suffer from two main problems: 1) they only focus on the functional information of APIs; 2) they analyze each text in isolation but ignore the correlations among them. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the pre-training model BERT to mine the non-functional information of APIs from Stack Overflow: we first tease out the correlations among questions, answers as well as corresponding reviews, so that one Q&amp;A can be analyzed as a whole; then, an information extraction model is constructed by fine-tuning BERT with three subtasks—entity identification, aspect classification, and sentiment analysis separately, and we use it to mine the texts in Q&amp;As step by step; finally, we summarize and visualize the results in a user-friendly way, so that developers can understand the information intuitively at the beginning of API selection. We evaluate our approach on 4,456 Q&amp;As collected from Stack Overflow. The results show our approach can identify the correlations among reviews with 90.1% precision, and such information can improve the performance of the data mining process. In addition, the survey on maturers and novices indicates the understandability and helpfulness of our method. Moreover, compared with language models, our method can provide more intuitive and brief information for API comparison in non-functional aspects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"241 ","pages":"Article 103228"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142660650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An empirical evaluation of a formal approach versus ad hoc implementations in robot behavior planning","authors":"Jan Vermaelen,&nbsp;Tom Holvoet","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103226","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103226","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As autonomous robotic systems integrate into various domains, ensuring their safe operation becomes increasingly crucial. A key challenge is guaranteeing safe decision making for cyber-physical systems, given the inherent complexity and uncertainty of real-world environments.</div><div>Tools like Gwendolen, vGOAL, and Tumato enable the use of formal methods to provide guarantees for correct and safe decision making. This paper concerns Tumato, a formal planning framework that generates complete behavior from a declarative specification. Tumato ensures safety by avoiding unsafe actions and states while achieving robustness by considering nondeterministic outcomes of actions. While formal methods claim to manage complexity, provide safety guarantees, and ensure robustness, empirical evaluation is necessary to validate these claims.</div><div>This work presents an empirical study comparing the characteristics of various ad hoc behavior planning implementations (developed by participants with diverse levels of experience in computer science), with implementations using Tumato. We investigate the usability of the different approaches and evaluate i) their effectiveness, ii) the achieved safety (guarantees), iii) their robustness in handling uncertainties, and iv) their adaptability, extensibility, and scalability. To our knowledge, this is the first participant-based empirical study of a formal approach for (safe and robust) autonomous behavior.</div><div>Our analysis confirms that while ad hoc methods offer some development flexibility, they lack the rigorous safety guarantees provided by formal methods. The study supports the hypothesis that formal methods, as implemented in Tumato, are effective tools for developing safe autonomous systems, particularly in managing complexity and ensuring robust decision making and planning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"241 ","pages":"Article 103226"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142586890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"View-based axiomatic reasoning for the weak memory models PSO and SRA","authors":"Lara Bargmann,&nbsp;Heike Wehrheim","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103225","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103225","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Weak memory models describe the semantics of concurrent programs in modern multicore architectures. As these semantics deviate from the commonly assumed model of sequential consistency, reasoning techniques like Owicki-Gries-style proof calculi need to be adapted to specific memory models. To avoid having to design a new proof calculus for every new memory model, a uniform approach for <em>axiomatic</em> reasoning has recently been proposed. This approach bases reasoning on memory-model independent <em>axioms</em> about thread <em>views</em> and how they are changed by program actions like reads and writes. It allows to prove program correctness based on axioms only. Such proofs are valid for all memory models instantiating the axioms.</div><div>In this paper, we study instantiations of the axioms for two memory models, the <em>Partial Store Order</em> (PSO) and the <em>Strong Release Acquire</em> (SRA) model. We see that both models fulfil all but one axiom, a different one though. For PSO, the missing axiom refers to message-passing abilities of memory models; for SRA, the missing axiom refers to the independence of actions on executing threads. We discuss the consequences of these missing axioms and illustrate the reasoning technique on a specific litmus test.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"240 ","pages":"Article 103225"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142554783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Verifying chip designs at RTL level","authors":"Nan Zhang,&nbsp;Zhijie Xu,&nbsp;Zhenhua Duan,&nbsp;Cong Tian,&nbsp;Wu Wang,&nbsp;Chaofeng Yu","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103224","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103224","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As chip designs become increasingly complex, the potential for errors and defects in circuits inevitably rises, posing significant challenges to chip security and reliability. This study investigates the use of the SAT-based bounded model checking (BMC) for Propositional Projection Temporal Logic (PPTL) to verify Verilog chip designs at the register transfer level (RTL). To this end, we propose an algorithm to implement automated extraction of state transfer relations from AIGER netlist and construction of Kripke structure. Additionally, we employ PPTL with the full regular expressiveness to describe the circuit properties to be verified, especially the periodic repetitive properties. This is not possible with Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) and Computational Tree Logic (CTL). By combining the PPTL properties with finite system paths and transforming them into conjunctive normal forms (CNFs), we utilize an SAT solver for verification. Experimental results demonstrate that our verification tool, SAT-BMC4PPTL, achieves higher verification efficiency and comprehensiveness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"240 ","pages":"Article 103224"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142532656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"VisFork: Towards a toolsuite for visualizing fork ecosystems","authors":"Siyue Chen ,&nbsp;Loek Cleophas ,&nbsp;Sandro Schulze ,&nbsp;Jacob Krüger","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103223","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103223","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In our previous work, we have developed and tested different visualizations that help analyze fork ecosystems. Our goal is to contribute analyses and tools that support developers as well as researchers in obtaining a better understanding of what happens within such ecosystems. In this article, we focus on the tool implementation of our most recent visualizations, which can help users to better understand the relations between and activities within forks. Since fork ecosystems are widely used in practice and well established research subjects, we hope that our tooling constitutes a helpful means for other researchers, too.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"241 ","pages":"Article 103223"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142592762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The CAOS framework for Scala: Computer-aided design of SOS","authors":"José Proença ,&nbsp;Luc Edixhoven","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103222","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103222","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We present <figure><img></figure>: a programming framework for <em>computer-aided design of structural operational semantics for formal models</em>. This framework includes a set of Scala libraries and a workflow to produce visual and interactive diagrams that animate and provide insights over the structure and the semantics of a given abstract model with operational rules.</div><div><figure><img></figure> follows an approach where theoretical foundations and a practical tool are built together, as an alternative to foundations-first design (“tool justifies theory”) or tool-first design (“foundations justify practice”). The advantage of <figure><img></figure> is that the tool-under-development can immediately be used to automatically run numerous and sizeable examples in order to identify subtle mistakes, unexpected outcomes, and unforeseen limitations in the foundations-under-development, as early as possible.</div><div>More concretely, <figure><img></figure> supports the quick creation of interactive websites that help the end-users better understand a new language, structure, or analysis. End-users can be research colleagues trying to understand a companion paper or students learning about a new simple language or operational semantics. We include a list of open-source projects with a web frontend supported by <figure><img></figure> that are used both in research and teaching contexts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"240 ","pages":"Article 103222"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142532754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Configurable Software Model of a Self-Adaptive Robotic System","authors":"Juliane Päßler ,&nbsp;Maurice H. ter Beek ,&nbsp;Ferruccio Damiani ,&nbsp;Einar Broch Johnsen ,&nbsp;S. Lizeth Tapia Tarifa","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103221","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103221","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Self-adaptation, meant to increase reliability, is a crucial feature of cyber-physical systems operating in uncertain physical environments. Ensuring safety properties of self-adaptive systems is of utter importance, especially when operating in remote environments where communication with a human operator is limited, like under water or in space. This paper presents a software model that allows the analysis of one such self-adaptive system, a configurable underwater robot used for pipeline inspection, by means of the probabilistic model checker ProFeat. Furthermore, it shows that the configurable software model is easily extensible to further, possibly more complex use cases and analyses.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"240 ","pages":"Article 103221"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142532655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards partial monitoring: Never too early to give in","authors":"Angelo Ferrando ,&nbsp;Rafael C. Cardoso","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103220","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103220","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Runtime Verification is a lightweight formal verification technique used to verify whether a system behaves as expected at runtime. Expected behaviour is typically formally specified using properties, which are used to automatically synthesise monitors. Properties that can be verified at runtime by a monitor are called <em>monitorable</em>, while those that cannot are termed <em>non-monitorable</em>. In this paper, we revisit the notion of monitorability and demonstrate how <em>non-monitorable</em> properties can still be used to generate <em>partial</em> monitors. We tackle this from two different perspectives: (i) by recognising that a monitor can give up on monitoring the property under analysis if it recognises that the monitoring will never conclude the satisfaction or violation of the property; (ii) by recognising that a monitor can give up on events that are not necessary for successful monitoring of the property under analysis. By considering these two aspects, we present how to achieve partial monitoring of Linear Temporal Logic properties by building upon the standard monitor construction. Finally, we present a prototype implementation of our approach and its application to a remote inspection case study, as well as a set of evaluation experiments to stress test our approach using synthetic properties.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"240 ","pages":"Article 103220"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142445382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An exploratory study on the usage of quantum programming languages","authors":"Felipe Ferreira ,&nbsp;José Campos","doi":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103217","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.scico.2024.103217","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As in the classical computing realm, quantum programming languages in quantum computing allow one to instruct a quantum computer to perform certain tasks. In the last 25 years, many imperative, functional, and multi-paradigm quantum programming languages with different features and goals have been developed. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has investigated who uses quantum languages, how practitioners learn a quantum language, how experience are practitioners with quantum languages, what is the most used quantum languages, in which context practitioners use quantum languages, what are the challenges faced by quantum practitioners while using quantum languages, are program written with quantum languages tested, and what are quantum practitioners' perspectives on the variety of quantum languages and the potential need for new languages. In this paper, we first conduct a systematic survey to find and collect all quantum languages proposed in the literature and/or by organizations. Secondly, we identify and describe 37 quantum languages. Thirdly, we survey 251 quantum practitioners to answer several research questions about their quantum language usage. Fourthly, we conclude that (i) 58.2% of all practitioners are 25–44 years old, 63.0% have a master's or doctoral degree, and 86.2% have more than five years of experience using classical languages. (ii) 60.6% of practitioners learn quantum languages from the official documentation. (iii) Only 16.3% of practitioners have more than five years of experience with quantum languages. (iv) Qiskit (Python) is the most used quantum language, followed by Cirq (Python) and QDK (Q#). (v) 42.8% use quantum languages for research. (vi) Lack of documentation and usage examples are practitioners' most challenging issues. Practitioners prefer open-source quantum languages with an easy-to-learn syntax (e.g., based on an existing classical language), available documentation and examples, and an active community. (vii) 76.4% of all participants test their quantum programs, and 42.6% test them automatically. (viii) A standard quantum language, perhaps high-level language, for quantum computation could accelerate the development of quantum programs. Finally, we present a set of suggestions for developers and researchers on the development of new quantum languages or enhancement of existing ones.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49561,"journal":{"name":"Science of Computer Programming","volume":"240 ","pages":"Article 103217"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142424074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}