He linux Basethe non-profit technology consortium that manages various open source efforts, today announced the launch of the TLA+ Base to promote the adoption and development of the TLA+ programming language. AWS, Oracle and Microsoft are among the inaugural members.
What is the TLA+ programming language? It is a formal “specification” language developed by computer scientist and mathematician Leslie Lamport. Best known for his seminal work on distributed systems, Lamport, now a Microsoft Research Scientist, created TLA+ to design, model, document, and test software programs, particularly those of the concurrent and distributed variety.
To give a few examples, ElasticSearch, the organization behind the search engine of the same name, used TLA+ to verify the correctness of its distributed system algorithms. On the other hand, Thales, the electrical systems manufacturing company, used TLA+ to model and develop fault-tolerant modules for its industrial control platform.
“TLA+ is unique in that it is meant to specify a system, rather than implement software,” a Linux Foundation spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “Based on mathematical concepts, in particular set theory and temporal logic, TLA+ allows the expression of the desired correctness properties of a system in a formal and rigorous way.”
TLA+ includes a pattern checker and theorem prover to check whether the specification of a system satisfies its desired properties. The goal is to help developers reason about systems above the code level, discovering and preventing design flaws (hopefully) before they become bugs during the later stages of software engineering.
Until that last point, software design flaws are surprisingly common and disruptive. a 2020 report of the Standish Group found that about 66% of software projects fail. AND according According to the Consortium for Software and Information Quality, poor software quality cost companies more than $2 trillion in 2020.
With the establishment of the TLA+ Foundation, the Linux Foundation says it will provide education and training resources around TLA+, fund research and develop tools for it, and work to foster a community of TLA+ practitioners. The TLA+ Foundation will also make decisions on language enhancements, address user feedback, and guide language evolution.
“TLA+ has already been successfully used by major technology companies such as Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft to verify and design systems on a planetary scale,” the spokesperson continued. “By establishing a TLA+ Foundation under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, TLA+ will gain greater visibility and support, promoting its broader adoption within the technology industry. The foundation’s mission to advocate for open source projects will ensure that TLA+ continues to evolve and remains accessible to the broader tech community. In addition, the foundation will facilitate greater collaboration between industry and academia, advancing the state of the art in formal methods and research on concurrent and distributed systems.”