zz VS taxoptimizer

There is this: https://github.com/zetzit/zz

You're right that you can't define a safe subset of C without making it practical. MISRA C defines a C subset intended to help avoid C's footguns, but it still isn't actually a safe language. There are alternative approaches though:

1. Compile a safe language to C (whether a new language or an existing one)

2. Formal analysis of C, or of some practical subset of C, to prove the absence of undefined behaviour

Work has been done on both approaches.

ZZ compiles to C. [0] Dafny can compile to C++, but it seems that's not its primary target. [1][2]

There are several projects on formal analysis of C. [3][4][5][6]

[0] https://github.com/zetzit/zz

[1] https://github.com/dafny-lang/dafny

[2] https://dafny-lang.github.io/dafny/

[3] https://frama-c.com/

[4] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vcc-a-verif...

[5] https://www.eschertech.com/products/ecv.php

[6] https://trust-in-soft.com/

Formal methods have been used successfully for decades; it's not just a pipe dream. Perfect software should ideally be something like ultra-low-defect software, though (that's the term the AdaCore folks use).

There are also other projects that aim to make formal software development much easier [0][1] and of course there's SPARK Ada.

[0] https://github.com/zetzit/zz

[1] https://github.com/dafny-lang/dafny

This post reminds me that I've been wanting to try out ZetZ[0]. It incorporates Z3 into a high-level programming language, and seems to do a lot of what the post talks about automatically.

[0] https://github.com/zetzit/zz

I still want to try the ZZ language (https://github.com/zetzit/zz) someday. It compiles to C, and uses a SMT solver to prove that you don't index out-of-bounds at compile time. But I don't like how it lacks generics, uses C idioms, and compiles to C.

The zz language uses a SMT solver to check for program soundness... I haven't tried it, but that's got to be more flexible and resource-hungry.

Especially the fact that it outputs C code. So interop is seamless.

https://github.com/zetzit/zz

For any systems language, interop with C is the litmus test.

With that in mind, this new language should not require 15,000 lines of standard library. A type-safe wrapper for libc should be enough...

You might find ZetZ interesting!

I used it to do some tax optimization around ISOs at a newly public company (https://gitlab.com/mbryant/taxoptimizer/-/blob/master/amt.py). It gets pretty slow when you try to look more than a few years out, so I'm guessing writing some optimization logic by hand would've made more sense. Using Z3 here definitely beat me trying to do this on paper like I've seen other people do!