Kittens

A toolkit to generate concrete test cases out of .cat files.

Use cases

Exploding a cat model

From a cat model, we can create fully-expanded cases (aka, "kittens") for the properties defined in the model. For example, to create all possible kittens with length 2 out of the SC model, run the following command.

kittens explode models/sc.cat 2

The result will have empty and acyclic statements that should hold in a correct atomic, sequentially consistent implementation.

Others

The other use cases, which are not merged in main yet are:

• converting a kitten to a C litmus test (runnable on Dartagnan and Herd7)
• converting a kitten to real C code (runnable natively, on Dartagnan or GenMC)
• converting a kitten to a Assembly litmus test (runnable on Dartagnan and Herd7)

Code structure

The project structure is this:

• lib/kittens/ - reusable code, parsers, etc
• cmd/ - commands (explode, ...)
• vendor/ - external source code (packrat)
• models/ - a few important .cat files

File types are:

• .cat - cat
• .scm - Scheme
• .sld - Scheme library definition
• .tst - Scheme test files
• .egg - CHICKEN Scheme package definition

There are also a few Makefiles that run tests in Chibi Scheme.

Building and installing

Dependencies

Kittens is written in Scheme R7RS and can be run with Chibi Scheme interpreter or compiled to binary with CHICKEN Scheme.

To a quick start, we recommend installing chibi-scheme. For example, assuming $HOME/.local/bin is in your PATH, you can install chibi-scheme like this:

git clone https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme
make -C chibi-scheme PREFIX=$HOME/.local install

To (optionally) install CHICKEN, use the package manager of your Linux distribution. For formatting the code in Kittens, you need to install schematic packagen from CHICKEN:

chicken-install schematic

Compiling

With CHICKEN, first compile, then run:

chicken-install -n
./explode <cat file> <#edges>

With Chibi, just call the commands:

cmd/explode.scm <cat file> <#edges>

Testing, building, formating

Use the targets in the Makefile:

make test   # uses chibi-scheme by default
make format # requires schematic package from chicken
make build  # compiles the commands to binary with CHICKEN

Installing

Run make install PREFIX=... to install kittens.