Semi-automated verification of Erlang code

Abstract

Erlang is a functional programming language with support for concurrency and message passing communication that is used at Ericsson for developing telecommunication applications. We consider the challenge of verifying temporal properties of systems programmed in Erlang with dynamically evolving process structures. To accomplish this a rich verijkation framework for goal-directed, proof systembased verification is used. This paper investigates the problem of semi-automating the verification task by identifying the proof parameters crucial for successful proof search.

Machine-checked natural semantics for Core Erlang: exceptions and side effects

“…Core Erlang was chosen as a stepping stone towards this goal, because not only a subset of Erlang, but Erlang and other functional languages, such as Elixir [12] and LFE, translate to it during compilation. While formalising our semantics, we reviewed and compared extensive related work on both Erlang [10,11,17,27] and Core Erlang [7, 13, 19-21, 24, 25] and chose an approach that can be properly embedded into Coq. For this goal, also the language specification [5] was considered along with the reference implementation (Erlang/OTP version 22.3).…”

A more accurate semantics for distributed erlang

“…It is constructed in a simple, easy to understand layered fashion. The semantics has been used as a basis in several different verification projects, such as semi-formal verification of Erlang code [17] and model checking a resource manager [18]. Fredlund's semantics has also been a basis for the development of a theorem prover [18] and a translation of Erlang into a language that can be model checked [4].…”

A semantics for distributed Erlang

“…Fredlund's semantics is a smallstep operational semantics that is simple, easy to understand and constructed in a layered fashion. The semantics has been used as a basis in several different verfication projects, such as semi-formal verification of Erlang code [14] and model checking a resource manager [15]. Fredlund's semantics has also been a basis for the development of a theorem prover [15] and a translation of Erlang into a language that can be model checked [4].…”