Go concurrency verification research at DoC grabs headline

A paper by DoC researchers at POPL on Go concurrency verification was featured in a tech blog and generates a buzz outside of the research community.

A paper by researchers at the department was recently featured in the morning paper, a blog by venture capitalist Adrian Colye, which summarises an important, influential, topical or otherwise interesting paper in the field of computer science every weekday in an easily digestible way by non-researchers. On the 2 Feb 2017 issue of the morning paper, It was highlighted as "the true spirit of POPL (Principles of Programming Languages)".

The paper, Fencing off Go: Liveness and Safety for Channel-based Programming by Julien Lange, Nicholas Ng, Bernardo Toninho and Nobuko Yoshida in the department, was presented last month in the prestigious ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) conference held in Paris, France. The work presents a static verification framework for Google's concurrent Go programming language, using behavioural types extracted from a Go program, and performs analysis on those types for verification.

The article gives an easily digestible summary of the technical work presented in the paper, and since then has garnered some attention from the Go developer community, as well as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) which organises the POPL 2017 conference.

#GoLang programmers: @adriancolyer unpacks "Fencing off Go," a #POPL2017 paper, in #TheMorningPaper. https://t.co/BaDJgrLusb pic.twitter.com/R4maGrNdia

— Official ACM (@TheOfficialACM) February 5, 2017