Gobra: Modular Specification and Verification of Go Programs (extended version)

Abstract

Go is an increasingly-popular systems programming language targeting, especially, concurrent and distributed systems. Go differentiates itself from other imperative languages by offering structural subtyping and lightweight concurrency through goroutines with messagepassing communication. This combination of features poses interesting challenges for static verification, most prominently the combination of a mutable heap and advanced concurrency primitives. We present Gobra, a modular, deductive program verifier for Go that proves memory safety, crash safety, data-race freedom, and user-provided specifications. Gobra is based on separation logic and supports a large subset of Go. Its implementation translates an annotated Go program into the Viper intermediate verification language and uses an existing SMT-based verification backend to compute and discharge proof obligations.