cbmc VS dmd

This appears to be more limited than what CBMC[1] (the C Bounded Model Checker) can do. CBMC can do function contracts. CBMC can prove memory safety and even the absence of memory leaks for non-trivial code bases that pass pointers all over the place that must eventually be freed. Applying all the annotations to make this happen though is like 10x the work of getting the program actually running in the first place. CBMC definitely makes C safer than even safe Rust for projects that can invest the time to use it. There is an experimental Rust front end to CBMC called Kani[2] that aims to verify unsafe Rust (thus making unsafe Rust become safe) but it is far from the speed and robustness of the C front end.

[1] https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc

[2] https://github.com/model-checking/kani

https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc/issues/7732 I'll note that some form of undefined behavior checking / documentation is on the roadmap for the next major version

So it seems to use cmbc and a bunch of other tools from cprover under the hood (bundled in the github release and setup on first run...). I would really like to have this "how" more visible in the documentation, it's essential to hint at the limitations of such an automated prover, even if the underlying system is rather powerful.

> The only reliable way to have bug-free code is to prove it. It requires solid mathematical foundations and a programming language that allows formal proofs.

I'm going to be the "actually" guy and say that, actually, you can formally verify some studff about programs written in traditional/mainstream languages, like C. Matter of fact, this is a pretty lively research area, with some tools like CBMC [0] and Infer [1] also getting significant adoption in the industry.

[0]: https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc

[1]: https://fbinfer.com/

Here's the pipeline spitting out the same error as on my macbook did.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/actions/runs/8023469412/job/219...

Not completely on topic (if you read TFA) but my favorite Git commit is by compiler badass and HN frequenter, where he checks in an entire C compiler to the D language repo:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12507

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27102584

A new generated code alone is 4000 lines long [1]. The actual code added is just 2000 lines, and some are used to pay debts, I mean, to make a proper code generator (which can be alternatively written in a simpler scripting langauge). In any case it is never comparable to the entier C parser proper.

[1] https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/15307/files#diff-3677bcc89...

D is completely opensource already (https://github.com/dlang/dmd). The "open" of OpenD is just ADR saying that OpenD will be more open to new language features than D has historically been.

The reference compiler, DMD, is open source: https://github.com/dlang/dmd

But they don't accept just any Pull Request or features the community submits, understandably. There's a process called DIP for language improvements: https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/README.md

However, by some accounts, it's really hard to get anything through.

Given D already has so many feature, I find that to be a good thing , to be honest, by not everyone agrees, of course.