Trace Semantics for C++11 Memory Model

The C and C++ languages introduced the relaxed-memory concurrency into the language specification for efficiency purposes in 2011.

Trace semantics can provide the mathematical foundation for the proposed C++11 memory model, and there is a lack of investigation of trace semantics for C++11.

The Promising Semantics (PS) of Kang et al. provides the standard SC-style operational semantics for the C++11 concurrency model, where “SC” refers to “Sequential Consistency”. Inspired by PS, in this paper we first investigate the trace semantics for the relaxed read and write accesses under C++11, acting in the denotational semantics style. In our semantic model, a trace is in the form of a sequence of snapshots, and the snapshots record the modification in the relevant global or local variables, and the thread view. Moreover, the trace semantics for the release/acquire accesses under C++11 is also explored, based on the separated thread views and newly added message views.

When considering this trace model, different accesses bring in their unique snapshots, and make distinguished effects on the production of the sequences.

For any given program, the proposed trace semantics in this paper produces all the valid traces directly. Further, our trace semantics, together with that for TSO and MCA ARMv8, has the possibility to be the foundation of the meta model of the trace semantics for weak memory models.