A separation logic for heap space under garbage collection

Abstract

We present SL♢, a Separation Logic that allows controlling the heap space consumption of a program in the presence of dynamic memory allocation and garbage collection. A user of the logic works with space credits, a resource that is consumed when an object is allocated and produced when a group of objects is logically deallocated, that is, when the user is able to prove that it has become unreachable and therefore can be collected. To prove such a fact, the user maintains pointed-by assertions that record the immediate predecessors of every object. Our calculus, SpaceLang, has mutable state, shared-memory concurrency, and code pointers. We prove that SL♢ is sound and present several simple examples of its use.