Alloy and Spin are used in modeling/verification. You can use these to verify properties of your system (like your IPC protocol, or a million other ideas). As

Alloy and Spin are used in modeling/verification. You can use these to verify properties of your system (like your IPC protocol, or a million other ideas). Aside: on HN, this guy [2] often shares his expertise on formal methods. Let's hope he chimes in w/his thoughts here ;) Zave (the author) studies Alloy and Spin by trying to model a service/protocol called "Chord" [1]. Her findings are summarized in "Table 2. Summary of comparative advantages on the Chord case study.": > Promela + C / Spin: not necessary to know a sufficiently strong global invariant, supports progress assertions > Alloy / Alloy Analyzer: half the startup time, safety assertions are declarative rather than procedural, can be used for a convincing proof of correctness [1] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/chord:sigcomm01/chord_sigcomm.pdf https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/chord:sigcomm01/chord_sigc... [2] https://www.hillelwayne.com/about/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/about/