Mace

Abstract

Building distributed systems is particularly difficult because of the asynchronous, heterogeneous, and failure-prone environment where these systems must run. Tools for building distributed systems must strike a compromise between reducing programmer effort and increasing system efficiency. We present Mace , a C++ language extension and source-to-source compiler that translates a concise but expressive distributed system specification into a C++ implementation. Mace overcomes the limitations of low-level languages by providing a unified framework for networking and event handling, and the limitations of high-level languages by allowing programmers to write program components in a controlled and structured manner in C++. By imposing structure and restrictions on how applications can be written, Mace supports debugging at a higher level, including support for efficient model checking and causal-path debugging. Because Mace programs compile to C++, programmers can use existing C++ tools, including optimizers, profilers, and debuggers to analyze their systems.

Distributed causal memory: modular specification and verification in higher-order distributed separation logic

“…Formal specification and verification of distributed systems and algorithms has been carried out by means of model checking [Holzmann 1997;Killian et al 2007;Lamport 1992;Pnueli 1977] and, more recently, using a variety of program logics: Disel [Sergey et al 2018] is a Hoare Type Theory for distributed program verification in Coq with ideas from separation logic. IronFleet [Hawblitzel et al 2015] allows for building provably correct distributed systems by combining TLA-style statemachine refinement with Hoare-logic verification in a layered approach, all embedded in Dafny [Leino 2010].…”

Aneris: A Mechanised Logic for Modular Reasoning about Distributed Systems

“…A benefit of using model-checking frameworks is that they allow to state both safety and liveness assertions as LTL assertions [29]. Mace [17] provides a suite for building and model-checking distributed systems with asynchronous protocols, including liveness conditions. Chapar [25] allows for model-checking of programs that use causally consistent distributed key-value stores.…”

“…This is largely the reason why previous work has traditionally focused on verification of protocols of core network components. In particular, in the context of model checking, where safety and liveness assertions [29] are considered, tools such as SPIN [9], TLA+ [23], and Mace [17] have been developed. More recently, significant contributions have been made in the field of formal proofs of implementations of challenging protocols, such as two-phase-commit, lease-based key-value stores, Paxos, and Raft [7,25,30,35,40].…”

Ignis: scaling distribution-oblivious systems with light-touch distribution

“…Distributed Environments A plethora of systems assist in the construction of distributed software. At one end of the spectrum, distributed operating systems [4,22,58,64,67,69,72,73,76,89] and programming languages [25,43,77,88] provide a significant amount of flexibility in the resulting application. However, they involve significant manual effort using the provided abstractions, which are strongly coupled with the underlying operating or runtime system.…”