Completeness of Iris-Based Program Logics
The work
| Authors | Johannes Hostert; Zichen Zhang; Puming Liu; Simon Oddershede Gregersen; Ralf Jung; Joseph Tassarotti |
|---|---|
| Editors | |
| Type | article |
| Year | 2026 |
| Citekey | hostert2026completeness |
Where it appeared
| Published in | Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages |
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| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | ICFP |
| Pages | 267--302 |
Identifiers
| DOI | 10.1145/3828682 |
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| ISSN | 2475-1421 |
Access
| Landing page | https://doi.org/10.1145/3828682 |
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Related
| Distinct from | cook1978soundness Cook's relative completeness, extended to a logic that breaks his stratification. The paper says so directly: Cook 'examines completeness of the Hoare triple rules under the assumption that one has a complete proof system for the assertion logic, a property that has come to be called relative completeness. In the case of Iris, we effectively do something' similar -- but Iris is higher-order and has no strict separation between assertion logic and specification logic, which is what made the result hard to state at all. |
|---|
Abstract
Traditionally, proof systems such as program logics come with two core theorems: soundness and completeness . The role of soundness is obvious: we want to be sure that arguments carried out inside the logic actually lead to correct conclusions. Completeness complements that by ensuring that the logic does not limit expressivity: in principle, any correct result can be obtained within the confines of the logic. This result typically has to be stated relative to the completeness of the assertion logic that is used to reason about pre- and postconditions. Over the past decade, the Iris framework has emerged as a widely used foundation for building separation logics. While Iris-based logics typically come with a soundness proof, none of them have had a proof of completeness. In this paper, we present the first approach for establishing completeness of Iris-based program logics, and we show the generality of our methodology by applying it to a range of different logics described in prior work, including partial and total concurrent separation logics for a higher-order ML-like language, two quantitative logics (for bounding execution time and probabilistic errors), and a relational logic for proving refinement. All our results have been mechanized in the Rocq prover.
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How it got here
| How it got here | agent via crossref |
|---|---|
| Added | 2026-09-03 12:24 UTC |
| Approved by | a person 2026-09-03 17:29 UTC |
Cite it as
@article{hostert2026completeness,
title = {Completeness of Iris-Based Program Logics},
author = {Johannes Hostert and Zichen Zhang and Puming Liu and Simon Oddershede Gregersen and Ralf Jung and Joseph Tassarotti},
year = {2026},
journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)},
volume = {10},
number = {ICFP},
pages = {267--302},
issn = {2475-1421},
doi = {10.1145/3828682},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/hostert2026completeness/ and will keep doing so.