compcert Open-Source Projects

CompCert

5 1,757 7.3 Coq

The CompCert formally-verified C compiler

Project mention: Differ: Tool for testing and validating transformed programs | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-31

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"
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NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020). The latest post mention was on 2024-01-31.