A general framework for certifying garbage collectors and their mutators

  • Authors:

  • Andrew McCreight;Zhong Shao;Chunxiao Lin;Long Li

  • Affiliations:

  • Yale University, New Haven, CT;Yale University, New Haven, CT;University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China;University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Garbage-collected languages such as Java and C# are becoming more and more widely used in both high-end software and real-time embedded applications. The correctness of the GC implementation is essential to the reliability and security of a large portion of the world's mission-critical software. Unfortunately, garbage collectors--especially incremental and concurrent ones--are extremely hard to implement correctly. In this paper, we present a new uniform approach to verifying the safety of both a mutator and its garbage collector in Hoare-style logic. We define a formal garbage collector interface general enough to reason about a variety of algorithms while allowing the mutator to ignore implementation-specific details of the collector. Our approach supports collectors that require read and write barriers. We have used our approach to mechanically verify assembly implementations of mark-sweep, copying and incremental copying GCs in Coq, as well as sample mutator programs that can be linked with any of the GCs to produce a fully-verified garbage-collected program. Our work provides a foundation for reasoning about complex mutator-collector interaction and makes an important advance toward building fully certified production-quality GCs.