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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Runtime Verification in Erlang by Using Contracts

Authors : Lars-Åke Fredlund, Julio Mariño, Sergio Pérez, Salvador Tamarit

Published in: Functional and Constraint Logic Programming

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

During its lifetime, a program regularly undergoes changes that seek to improve its functionality or efficiency. However, such modifications may also introduce new errors. In this work, we use the design-by-contract approach to allow programmers to formally state, in the code, some of the knowledge and assumptions originally made when the code was first written. Such contracts can then be checked at runtime, to ensure that modifications made to a program did not violate those assumptions. Applying these principles we have designed a runtime verification system for the Erlang language, permitting to specify as annotations the contracts needed for both sequential and concurrent code. As a second contribution we extend the commonly used Erlang gen_server behaviour (a design pattern) permitting to specify declaratively when a server is ready to service a client request. The ideas presented in this paper have been implemented in a tool named EDBC. Its source code is available at github.com as an open-source and free project.

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previous chapter Measuring Coverage of Prolog Programs Using Mutation Testing

next chapter Enhancing POI Testing Through the Use of Additional Information

For example, process links help structure fault detection and fault recovery in complex applications.

As an implementation decision, we have chosen to use Erlang macros to represent all contracts. The reason is that similar tools like EUnit also use macros for assert definitions.

Note that decreasing-argument contracts only guarantee termination if the sequence is strictly decreasing and well founded, i.e. values cannot go below a certain limit.

The from of the request has the same form as in the handle_call/3 callback, i.e., a tuple {Pid,Tag}, where Pid is the process identifier of the client issuing the request, and Tag is a unique tag.

See http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1290427/how-do-you-do-selective-receives-in-gen-servers.

https://github.com/tamarit/edbc/tree/master/examples/readers_writers.

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Title: Runtime Verification in Erlang by Using Contracts
Authors: Lars-Åke Fredlund
Julio Mariño
Sergio Pérez
Salvador Tamarit
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Functional and Constraint Logic Programming
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16201-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-16202-3

Copyright Year: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16202-3_4

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