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"Tackling Concurrency Bugs with TLA+" by Hillel Wayne

Strange Loop Conference · 23.8K views · 2017-10-02 · 30:06

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Overview

Hillel Wayne's Strange Loop talk introducing TLA+ as a specification language for finding concurrency bugs in designs. It covers stalling, race conditions and dropped messages, with PlusCal examples.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a concise, high-level intro to what TLA+ is and when it helps.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2018–2025

Topics

Logic & formal methodsDistributed systems
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tla+concurrencypluscalformal methodshillel wayne

What people said

cess11 · 2025-05 · Recommendation

The literature on distributed systems is huge. It depends a lot on your use case what you ought to do. If you're lucky you can avoid shared state, as in no race conditions in either end of your executions. [VIDEO] is fairly concise and gives some recommendations for literature and techniques, obviously making an effort in promoting PlusCal/TLA+ along the way but showcases how even apparently simple algorithms can be problematic as well as how deep analysis has to go to get you a guarantee that the execution will be bug free.

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bandwitch · 2018-07 · Recommendation

I feel TLA+ would be too much to ask in a system interview which is what this site is about. In case anybody is interested, there is a nice talk by Hillel Wayne on youtube ( [VIDEO] ) that provides a high-level overview on what TLA+ is about.

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ajmurmann · 2018-03 · Recommendation

Hillel gave a pretty interesting talk on TLA+ at last year's StrangeLoop: [VIDEO] If you are new to TLA+ and just want to get the basic idea and use cases, I recommend the talk. Edit: I think he also brought home made granola or something. So attending his talks in person has benefits.

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Sources

Video by Strange Loop Conference, played through YouTube.

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