CompCert VS cakeml

Compare CompCert vs cakeml and see what are their differences.

CompCert

The CompCert formally-verified C compiler (by AbsInt)
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CompCert cakeml
36 14
1,744 904
1.7% 2.8%
7.3 9.8
9 days ago 5 days ago
Coq Standard ML
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

CompCert

Posts with mentions or reviews of CompCert. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-31.
  • Differ: Tool for testing and validating transformed programs
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2024
    A big problem is that proving that transformations preserve semantics is very hard. Formal methods has huge potential and I believe it will be a big part of the future, but it hasn't become mainstream yet. Probably a big reason why is that right now it's simply not practical: the things you can prove are much more limited than the things you can do, and it's a lot less work to just create a large testsuite.

    Example: CompCert (https://compcert.org/), a formally-verified compiler AKA formally-verified sequence of semantics-preserving transformations from C code to Assembly. It's a great accomplishment, but few people are actually compiling their code with CompCert. Because GCC and LLVM are much faster[1], and have been used so widely that >99.9% of code is going to be compiled correctly, especially code which isn't doing anything extremely weird.

    But as articles like this show, no matter how large a testsuite there may always be bugs, tests will never provide the kind of guarantees formal verification does.

    [1] From CompCert, "Performance of the generated code is decent but not outstanding: on PowerPC, about 90% of the performance of GCC version 4 at optimization level 1"

  • So you think you know C?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jan 2024
  • Can the language of proof assistants be used for general purpose programming?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Oct 2023
    Also a C compiler (https://compcert.org/). I did exaggerate bit in saying that anything non-trivial is "nearly impossible".

    However, both CompCert and sel4 took a few years to develop, whereas it would only take months if not weeks to make versions of both which aren't formally verified but heavily tested.

  • A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2023
    From my experience, while many MCUs have settled for the big compilers (GCC and Clang), DSPs and some FPGAs (not Intel and Xilinx, those have lately settled for Clang and a combination of Clang and GCC respectively) use some pretty bespoke compilers (just running ./ --version is enough to verify this, if the compiler even offers that option). That's not necessarily bad, since many of them offer some really useful features, but error messages can be really cryptic in some cases. Also some industries require use of verified compilers, like CompCert[1], and in such cases GCC and Clang just don't cut it.

    [1]: https://compcert.org/

  • Rosenpass – formally verified post-quantum WireGuard
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2023
  • OpenAI might be training its AI technology to replace some software engineers, report says
    4 projects | /r/programming | 28 Jan 2023
    But that's fine, because we can do even better with things like the CompCert C compiler, which is formally proven to produce correct asm output for ISO C 2011 source. It's designed for high-reliability, safety-critical applications; it's used for things like Airbus A380 avionics software, or control software for emergency generators at nuclear power plants. Software that's probably not overly sophisticated and doesn't need to be highly optimized, but does need to work ~100% correctly, ~100% of the time.
  • Checked C
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Dec 2022
    Does anybody know how does this compare to https://compcert.org/ ?
  • Is it possible to make C as safe as Rust?
    3 projects | /r/C_Programming | 29 Sep 2022
    There is. They're called formally verified compilers, and are used for safety critical applications: https://compcert.org/ https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert
  • New Coq tutorial
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 5 Jul 2022
    Hi all, Coq is a "proof assistant" that allows you to write both code and proofs in the same language (thanks to the Curry–Howard correspondence). Its uses range from pure math (e.g., the Feit–Thompson theorem was proven in Coq!) to reasoning about programming languages (e.g., proving the soundness of a type system) to writing verified code (e.g., this verified C compiler!). You can "extract" your code (without the proofs) to OCaml/Haskell/Scheme for running it in production. Coq is awesome, but it's known for having a steep learning curve (it's based on type theory, which is a foundational system of mathematics). It took me several years to become proficient in it. I wanted to help people pick it up faster than I did, so I wrote this introductory tutorial. Hope you find it useful!
  • The Software Foundations: mathematical underpinnings of reliable software
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Mar 2022
    Not an expert but I've heard formal methods are used in Chip Design. Also https://compcert.org/ a c compiler which uses formal verifcation. I tiored some exercises in the series. Its pretty interesting thing to do, but yes I don't think its great for rapid software development.

cakeml

Posts with mentions or reviews of cakeml. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-11.
  • The Deep Link Equating Math Proofs and Computer Programs
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Oct 2023
    If I understand what you are asking about correctly, then I do think you are mistaken.

    As a sibling comment observed, you would be proving something about a program, but proving things about programs is both possible and done.

    This ranges from things like CakeML (https://cakeml.org/) and CompCert (compilers with verified correctness proofs of their optimizations) to something simple like absence of runtime type errors in statically strongly soundly-typed languages.

    Of note is that you are proving properties of your program, not proving them perfect in every way. The properties of your program that you prove can vary wildly in both difficulty and usefulness. A sufficiently advanced formally verified compiler like CakeML can transfer a high-level proof about your source code to a corresponding proof about the behavior of the generated machine-executable code.

  • The future of Clang-based tooling
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2023
    > A single IR with multiple passes is a good way to build a compiler

    https://mlir.llvm.org/, which is using, is largely claiming the opposite. Most passes more naturally are not "a -> a", but "a -> b". data structures and data structures work hand in hand, it is very nice to produce "evidence" for what is done in the output data structure.

    This is why https://cakeml.org/, which "can't cheat" with partial functions, has so many IRs!

    Using just a single IR was historically done for cost-control, the idea being that having many IRs was a disaster in repetitive boilerplate. MLIR seeks to solve that exact problem!

  • old languages compilers
    12 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 26 Dec 2022
    CakeML
  • Is there a formally-proven real-time language/computing env. or operating system?
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 7 Sep 2022
    There is also Cake ML which is a formally verified functional programming language compiler and runtime.
  • CakeML: A Verified Implementation of ML
    2 projects | /r/sml | 7 Mar 2022
    There is also a CakeML -> Standard ML compiler though it seems to have been built to translate benchmarks and sort of old so I'm not sure how comprehensive it is: https://github.com/CakeML/cakeml/tree/master/unverified/front-end
    2 projects | /r/sml | 7 Mar 2022
  • The λ-Cube
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2022
    > One guess is that lisps cope with being minimal through use of macros and metaprogramming, it's difficult for a typed language to support that level of metaprogramming while maintaining the various guarantees that one wants from such a system.

    Difficult, but certainly not impossible [0].

    [0] https://cakeml.org/

  • Two Mechanisations of WebAssembly 1.0
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 3 Jan 2022
    If this interests you, I'd highly recommend checking out CompCert (docs here) and CakeML.
  • Please critique Pancake, my first ever langdev project!
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 11 Oct 2021
  • A Proven Correct C Compiler (Used by Airbus)
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2021
    CakeML[0] is another formally verified compiler. Notably, unlike compcert, it is open source.

    The language it implements (an sml dialect) is high-level and garbage collected, meaning that it is not usable in all of the same domains, but work is ongoing to reuse much of the compiler infrastructure for 'pancake', a low-level language.

    0. https://github.com/CakeML/cakeml

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CompCert and cakeml you can also consider the following projects:

seL4 - The seL4 microkernel

coq - Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs.

unbound - Replib: generic programming & Unbound: generic treatment of binders

Daikon - Dynamic detection of likely invariants

gcc

vericert - A formally verified high-level synthesis tool based on CompCert and written in Coq.

koika - A core language for rule-based hardware design 🦑

hardware - Verilog development and verification project for HOL4

corn - Coq Repository at Nijmegen [maintainers=@spitters,@VincentSe]

proofs - My personal repository of formally verified mathematics.

winix - A UNIX-style Operating System for the Waikato RISC Architecture Microprocessor (WRAMP)

silt - An in-progress fast, dependently typed, functional programming language implemented in Swift.