# anishathalye/porcupine

A fast linearizability checker written in Go 🔎

Repository: https://github.com/anishathalye/porcupine
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/anishathalye-porcupine
Homepage: https://anishathalye.com/testing-distributed-systems-for-linearizability/
Language: Go
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2026-08-06T17:36:54+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 75/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 96, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3385, "days_push": 27, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1241, forks 71 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:06.383418+00:00)

## What it is
Porcupine is a fast linearizability checker written in Go, used to test the correctness of concurrent and distributed systems against sequential specifications. It implements P-compositionality optimizations, is orders of magnitude faster than Knossos, and includes a visualizer for histories and linearization points.

## Use cases
- check if a concurrent history is linearizable
- test correctness of a distributed key-value store
- verify linearizability of Jepsen test histories
- visualize concurrent histories and linearization points
- replace Knossos with a faster linearizability checker
- write executable sequential specifications in Go for model checking

## When to choose
- you need to verify linearizability of concurrent or distributed systems in Go
- you need to check large histories that Knossos cannot handle
- you want both programmatic checking and history visualization

## When to avoid
- your system model is not expressible as a sequential specification in Go
- you need full formal verification rather than history-based testing
- you are not working in the Go ecosystem

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: active
- function: testing, concurrency, developer-tools
- domain: microservices, testing
- platform: go, cross-platform
- tags: linearizability-checker, distributed-systems-testing, formal-verification, jepsen-alternative, history-visualization, algorithms

## Member repositories
- anishathalye/porcupine (main) score 75

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:06.383418+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T05:08:28.167557+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/anishathalye/porcupine (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:06.383418+00:00, sha 15ab50075eb3)
  - homepage: https://anishathalye.com/testing-distributed-systems-for-linearizability/ (fetched 2026-08-29T12:20:15.639545+00:00, sha ea3060166c9e)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.