Safely writing high-performance concurrent programs is notoriously difficult. To aid developers, we introduce Armada, a language and tool designed to formally verify such programs with relatively little effort. Via a C-like language and a small-step, state-machine-based semantics, Armadagives developers the flexibility to choose arbitrary memory layout and synchronization primitives so that they are never constrained in their pursuit of performance. To reduce developer effort, Armadaleverages SMT-powered automation and a library of powerful reasoning techniques, including rely-guarantee, TSO elimination, reduction, and pointer analysis. All of these techniques are proven sound, and Armadacan be soundly extended with additional strategies over time. Using Armada, we verify five concurrent case studies and show that we can achieve performance equivalent to that of unverified code.

@article{paperbot1615,
  title = {Armada: Automated Verification of Concurrent Code with Sound Semantic Extensibility},
  author = {Jacob R. Lorch and Yixuan Chen and Manos Kapritsos and Haojun Ma and Bryan Parno and Shaz Qadeer and Upamanyu Sharma and James R. Wilcox and Xueyuan Zhao},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems},
  volume = {44},
  number = {2},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1145/3502491}
}