Closing the Gap – The Formally Verified Optimizing Compiler CompCert [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Closing the Gap – The Formally Verified Optimizing Compiler CompCert [pdf]

hal.inria.fr

66 pointspanic10 comments

A few things I notice from skimming the paper and perusing related sites:

1. Although the source is available free of charge, CompCert is not free software. I couldn't find pricing on the AbsInt site or the North American vendor's site ("Ask for a quote").

2. Currently targets IA32, 32-bit PowerPC, and ARMv6.

3. Covers most of C99, except VLAs and certain abuses of switch statements (e.g., Duff's device).

4. Faster and smaller code than GCC -O0, reasonably close to -O1 and -O2.

John Regehr points out: "If we want better code out of [GCC et al.] we can turn on their optimizers, but at that point they would fail to be capable of translating 1,000,000 random programs without miscompiling a few times."

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1052

I'm less inclined to use C as time goes by, but for the embedded market that CompCert targets, it seems like a really useful tool.

Weird, the print dialog opened directly when I clicked the above link. Is that a "normal" PDF feature, or was it triggered from someplace else?

Same on Linux + Chrome

And even with uMatrix installed + JS disabled for that domain!

Edit: raised an issue in uMatrix: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/672

Semi-normal (PDF JavaScript)

http://superuser.com/a/263875

Wow. That's an achievement.

The key to getting the problem down to a manageable size for verification seems to have been using a large number of passes, so that each pass performs a well-defined transformation on a sequential file.

That's a good software pattern in general, and as you use more and more powerfully typed languages, the Coq analogy becomes even more obvious. If you write small modules, it's easier to statically prove more behavior. Then all you need is to compose the modules, and thanks to composition being a small, well-defined, and lawful operation, the correctness of your program becomes the sum of its proofs :)

There's been at least one attempt to make LLVM verifiable, however it's largely stalled: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~stevez/vellvm/

I'm sorry, I won't read this until I can do so on a formally verified pdf renderer or an attacker might hack me further upstream. Oh no, I'm commenting using an unverified browser! runs screaming into the middle distance

Pff, amateur. The only safe way to read pdfs is by getting a bunch of smartphones by dumpster diving and then discarding them once you've read the pdf once.

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