cakeml VS wuffs

Compare cakeml vs wuffs and see what are their differences.

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cakeml wuffs
14 80
904 3,695
2.8% 1.1%
9.8 9.4
5 days ago 2 days ago
Standard ML 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.

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

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 cakeml 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

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

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

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

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

checkedc - Checked C is an extension to C that lets programmers write C code that is guaranteed by the compiler to be type-safe. The goal is to let people easily make their existing C code type-safe and eliminate entire classes of errors. Checked C does not address use-after-free errors. This repo has a wiki for Checked C, sample code, the specification, and test code.

haxe - Haxe - The Cross-Platform Toolkit

Daikon - Dynamic detection of likely invariants