An approach to compositional reasoning about concurrent objects and futures

Distributed and concurrent object-oriented systems are difficult to analyze due to the complexity of their concurrency, communication, and synchronization mechanisms. Rather than performing analysis at the code level of mainstream objectoriented languages such as Java and C++, we consider an imperative, objectoriented language with a simpler concurrency model. This language, based on concurrent objects communicating by asynchronous method calls and futures, avoids some difficulties of mainstream object-oriented programming languages related to compositionality and aliasing. In particular, reasoning about futures is handled by means of histories. Compositional verification systems facilitate system analysis, allowing components to be analyzed independently of their environment. In this paper, a compositional proof system in dynamic logic for partial correctness is established based on communication histories and class invariants. The soundness and relative completeness of this proof system follow by construction using a transformational approach from a sequential language with a non-deterministic assignment operator.