arXiv subjects

Simon Daniel

Publications and source records attributed to Simon Daniel.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

On Eliminating the Impossible with Dependent Types: Choreographic Libraries with Proof-Carrying Located Values

With growing complexity, distributed software systems become increasingly challenging to maintain and reason about. When implementing a distributed protocol, developers must ensure manually that the different components fit together. Choreographic programming addresses this challenge by specifying global protocols in a single program and projecting them into communicating processes, so-called endpoints. Recent choreographic approaches are designed as programming libraries that embed this paradigm into a host language like Haskell or Rust. In these designs, we observe common cases of partiality: unreachable branches in endpoint projection (EPP) and located-value access can trigger runtime errors or undefined behavior, relying on manual discipline of library maintainers rather than being statically type-checked. Also, some programs require users to write down dummy branches that should not be reachable, for example when branching on sum types. To close this gap, we use the dependently typed Lean programming language to implement a similar choreographic library. We show how we are able to move from a partial EPP to a total EPP function, and also eliminate cases of partiality in user-written code with pattern matching on sum types. ChorLean ensures total EPP and safe value access via proof-carrying located values, passing Lean's totality checker without undefined cases, while supporting the same feature set as libraries like MultiChor.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2026

Mechanizing Choreographic Programs and Hoare Logic with State Transformers

Choreographic programming is a programming model for developing distributed applications where an entire communication protocol is written as a single program, which a compiler then projects to one process per participant. Choreographic programming abstracts over low-level network communication primitives such as sockets, and provides a high degree of safety guarantees with deadlock freedom ensured by construction. Mechanizing choreographies necessarily deals with both operations specific to distributed programming and standard (local) operations that also occur in non-distributed programs, as well as the typical issues of binding and substitution. We aim to sidestep the latter issues, thereby obtaining a more concise mechanization that focuses on the essential distributed aspects of choreographies. To this end, we use a method recently proposed by Thiemann to elegantly model deadlock-free processes in a dependently typed language: Using state transformers to represent the computations performed by each process. We bring the state transformer model to choreographies, allowing us to reduce the usual mechanization effort around binding and substitution, and to abstract over the details of the "local" aspects of the language. We mechanize in Lean a choreographic language that supports point-to-point communication, broadcasting, recursive procedures, and local stateful methods, allowing each participant to be assigned a different set of methods. We prove soundness and completeness of endpoint projection, establish deadlock freedom for the projected processes, prove confluence, and verify a Hoare logic for choreographies.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2017

Functional Requirements-Based Automated Testing for Avionics

We propose and demonstrate a method for the reduction of testing effort in safety-critical software development using DO-178 guidance. We achieve this through the application of Bounded Model Checking (BMC) to formal low-level requirements, in order to generate tests automatically that are good enough to replace existing labor-intensive test writing procedures while maintaining independence from implementation artefacts. Given that existing manual processes are often empirical and subjective, we begin by formally defining a metric, which extends recognized best practice from code coverage analysis strategies to generate tests that adequately cover the requirements. We then formulate the automated test generation procedure and apply its prototype in case studies with industrial partners. In review, the method developed here is demonstrated to significantly reduce the human effort for the qualification of software products under DO-178 guidance.

cs.SE↗