Comment by zihotki
14 hours ago
I think that's what author implies by this sentence in the intro:
> It’s still your responsibility to understand your system and define what “correctness” means, and you need a high-level understanding of temporal logic.
As TLA+ uses state machines that can define infinite state spaces, checking arbitrary temporal logic formulas is undecidable in the general case.
Using a TLC model checker to verify invariants or properties, finding a valid counterexample can scale non-elementarily.
In fact, in some situations it can end up being Ackermann-complete[0], but even recursively enumerable problems can be Tower-complete.
I would say that unless you focus on more detailed temporal logic pitfalls you may have issues.
So IMHO this will stay a use case specific solution, that you choose based on context.
Even a common solution like adding Circumscription causes counterintuitive changes [1][2].
IMHO, if you want to use TLA+ as a primary method, you will need some depth or be ready to abandon it by time boxing etc…
Remember that we know the open domain frame problem in [2] is equal to HALT, it will not universally apply.
It is just another tool that works well when it works well.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13866
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20822
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumscription_(logic)
OTOH if you’re developing a service with a frontend and a backend you are firmly in the distributed system territory even if you only have one user, so it doesn’t have to work all the time; it’s enough if it works approximately more often than not to be an improvement.