CompCert VS wuffs

Compare CompCert vs wuffs and see what are their differences.

CompCert

The CompCert formally-verified C compiler (by AbsInt)

wuffs

Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely (by google)
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CompCert wuffs
36 80
1,744 3,695
1.7% 1.1%
7.3 9.4
8 days ago 1 day ago
Coq C
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.

wuffs

Posts with mentions or reviews of wuffs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-04.
  • Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2024
    Maybe this is what you are looking for:

    https://github.com/google/wuffs

    "Wuffs is a memory-safe programming language (and a standard library written in that language) for Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely."

  • Just about every Windows/Linux device vulnerable to new LogoFAIL firmware attack
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2023
    This is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of wuffs[0] - it specifically targets dealing with formats like pictures, safely, and the result drops in to a C codebase to make the compat/migration story easy.

    [0] https://github.com/google/wuffs

  • Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
    One example for a safer language developed at Google: https://github.com/google/wuffs
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
    There are already huffman-decoding and some parts of webp algorithms in https://github.com/google/wuffs (language that finds missing bounds checks during compilations). In contrary, according to readme, this language allows to write more optimized code (compared to C). WEBP decoding is stated as a midterm target in the roadmap.
  • The WebP 0day
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Sep 2023
    Specifically, since performance is crucial for this type of work, it should be written in WUFFS. WUFFS doesn't emit bounds checks (as Java does and as Rust would where it's unclear why something should be in bounds at runtime) it just rejects programs where it can't see why the indexes are in-bounds.

    https://github.com/google/wuffs

    You can explicitly write the same checks and meet this requirement, but chances are since you believe you're producing a high performance piece of software which doesn't need checks you'll instead be pulled up by the fact the WUFFS tooling won't accept your code and discover you got it wrong.

    This is weaker than full blown formal verification, but not for the purpose we care about in program safety, thus a big improvement on humans writing LGTM.

  • What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Sep 2023
    > parsing encoded files tends to introduce vulnerabilities

    If we are talking about binary formats, now there are systematic solutions like https://github.com/google/wuffs that protect against vulnerabilities. But SQLite is not just a format - it's an evolving ecosystem with constantly added features. And the most prominent issue was not even in core, it was in FTS3. What will SQLite add next? More json-related functions? Maybe BSON? It is useful, but does not help in this situation.

    Regarding traces, there are many forensics tools and even books about forensic analysis of SQLite databases. In well-designed format such tools should not exist in the first place. This is hard requirement: if it requires rewriting the whole file - then so be it.

  • CVE-2023-4863: Heap buffer overflow in WebP (Chrome)
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2023
    I agree that Wuffs [1] would have been a very good alternative! If it can be made more generally. AFAIK Wuffs is still very limited, in particular it never allows dynamic allocation. Many formats, including those supported by Wuffs the library, need dynamic allocation, so Wuffs code has to be glued with unverified non-Wuffs code [2]. This only works with simpler formats.

    [1] https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/wuffs-the-lang...

    [2] https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/note/memory-sa...

  • NSO Group iPhone Zero-Click, Zero-Day Exploit Captured in the Wild
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2023
    There are efforts to do that, notably https://github.com/google/wuffs

    RLBox is another interesting option that lets you sandbox C/C++ code.

    I think the main reason is that security is one of those things that people don't care about until it is too late to change. They get to the point of having a fast PDF library in C++ that has all the features. Then they realise that they should have written it in a safer language but by that point it means a complete rewrite.

    The same reason not enough people use Bazel. By the time most people realise they need it, you've already implemented a huge build system using Make or whatever.

  • FaaS in Go with WASM, WASI and Rust
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 May 2023
    Here's an off-topic answer.

    Depends on what you want your toy language to do and what sort of runtime support you'd like to lean on.

    JVM is pretty good for a lot of script-y languages, does impose overhead of having a JVM around. Provides GC, Threads, Reflection, consistent semantics. Tons of tools, libraries, support.

    WebAssembly is constrained (for running-in-a-browser safety reasons) but then you get to run your code in a browser, or as a service, etc, and Other People are working hard on the problem of getting your WA to go fast. That used to be a big reason for using JVM, but it turns out that Security Is Darn Hard.

    I have used C in the (distant) past as an IL, and that works up to a point, implementing garbage collection can be a pain if that's a thing that you want. C compilers have had a lot of work on them over the years, and you also have access to some low-level stuff, so if you were E.G. trying to come up with a little language that had super-good performance, C might be a good choice. (See also, [Wuffs](https://github.com/google/wuffs), by Nigel Tao et al at Google).

    A suggestion, if you do target C -- don't work too hard to find isomorphisms between C's data structures and YourToyLang's data structures. Back around 1990, I did my C-generating compiler for Modula-3, and a friend at Xerox PARC used C as a target for Cedar Mesa, and Hans used it in a lower-level way (so I was mapping between M-3 records and C structs, for example, Hans was not) and the lower-level way worked better -- i.e., I chose poorly. It worked, but lower-level worked better.

    If you are targeting a higher-level language, Rust and Go both seem like interesting options to me. Both have the disadvantage that they are still changing slightly but you get interesting "services" from the underlying VM -- for Rust, the borrow checker, plus libraries, for Go, reflection, goroutines, and the GC, plus libraries.

    Rust should get you slightly higher performance, but I'd worry that you couldn't hide the existence of the borrow checker from your toy language, especially if you wanted to interact with Rust libraries from YTL. If you wanted to learn something vaguely publishable/wider-interesting, that question right there ("can I compile a TL to Rust, touch the Rust libraries, and not expose the borrow checker? No+what-I-tried/Yes+this-worked") is not bad.

    I have a minor conflict of interest suggesting Go; I work on Go, usually on the compiler, and machine-generated code makes great test data. But regarded as a VM, I am a little puzzled why it hasn't seen wider use, because the GC is great (for lower-allocation rates than Java however; JVM GC has higher throughout efficiency, but Go has tagless objects, interior pointer support, and tiny pause times. Go-the-language makes it pretty easy to allocate less.) Things Go-as-a-VM currently lacks:

    - tail call elimination (JVM same)

  • Don't carelessly rely on fixed-size unsigned integers overflow
    7 projects | /r/C_Programming | 24 Jan 2023
    Because if you couldn't prevent creation of pointers from the thin air (e.g. by sending them to remove server and then pulling them from said server) then you can not prove anything of that sort and if you limit such operations then you are starting journey on the road to Rust or Wuffs!

What are some alternatives?

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

png-decoder - A pure-Rust, no_std compatible PNG decoder

stb - stb single-file public domain libraries for C/C++

csharplang - The official repo for the design of the C# programming language

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.

image-png - PNG decoding and encoding library in pure Rust

highway - Performance-portable, length-agnostic SIMD with runtime dispatch

rust - Rust for the xtensa architecture. Built in targets for the ESP32 and ESP8266

binrw - A Rust crate for helping parse and rebuild binary data using ✨macro magic✨.

kandria - A post-apocalyptic actionRPG. Now on Steam!

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

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