Concurrent separation logic

Abstract

Concurrent Separation Logic (CSL) was originally advanced in papers of the authors published in Theoretical Computer Science for John Reynolds’s 70th Birthday Festschrift (2007). Preliminary versions appeared as invited papers in the CONCUR’04 conference proceedings. Foundational work leading to these papers began in 2002. Since then there have been significant developments stemming from CSL, both in theoretical and practical research. In this retrospective paper we describe the main ideas that underpin CSL, placing these ideas into historical context by summarizing the prevailing tendencies in concurrency verification and programming language semantics when the logic was being invented in 2002-2003. We end with a snapshot of the state-of-the-art as of 2016. Along the way we describe some of the main developments in the intervening period, and we attempt to classify the work that has been done, along broad lines. While we do not intend an exhaustive survey, we do hope to provide some general perspective on what has been achieved in the field, what remains to be done, and directions for future work.