On the CRON Conjecture

Abstract

Declarative networking is a recent approach to programming distributed applications with languages inspired by Datalog. A recent conjecture posits that the delivery of messages should respect causality if and only if they are used in non-monotone derivations. We present our results about this conjecture in the context of Dedalus, a Datalog-variant for distributed programming. We show that both directions of the conjecture fail under a strong semantical interpretation. But on a more syntactical level, we can show that positive Dedalus programs can tolerate non-causal messages, in the sense that they compute the correct answer even when messages can be sent into the past.