High-Confidence, Modular Compiler Development in a Formal Environment
Read PDF →Gray, 2005
Category: Compilers
Overall Rating
Score Breakdown
- Cross Disciplinary Applicability: 2/10
- Latent Novelty Potential: 2/10
- Obscurity Advantage: 1/5
- Technical Timeliness: 1/10
Synthesized Summary
This paper documents an attempt to build a high-confidence compiler using formal methods at a specific point in time, within a particular ecosystem (MetaPRL).
It highlights the challenges and compromises necessary then, particularly the reliance on informal components and tactical trust to manage complexity.
Modern researchers would engage with more advanced proof assistants and established verified compiler frameworks (developed post-2005) that have overcome many of these specific hurdles...
Optimist's View
the specific architectural decomposition into a minimal, formally defined, trusted core composed solely of declarative rules and rewrites... guided by complex, potentially informal, untrusted tactics.
A potentially revolutionary, unconventional research direction stems directly from this trusted/untrusted split and the identified weakness in complex informal tactics: replacing or augmenting the untrusted tactics with advanced AI search or planning agents.
An error in the AI's strategy would simply lead to compilation failure or inefficiency, not a semantically incorrect output, because semantic correctness is enforced by the trusted rules.
This could have applications far beyond compilers, including formal verification itself (guiding proof assistants), AI alignment..., and automated synthesis of complex software.
Skeptic's View
The most significant decay lies in the foundational platform... MetaPRL... did not achieve widespread adoption or long-term community support comparable to systems like Coq, Isabelle/HOL...
it explicitly documents significant compromises that undermine its central claims, particularly "High-Confidence."
The paper's honesty about having "a small body of tactic code that we must trust," the type inference being "almost entirely informal" and relying on validating output rather than verifying the process...
A verified frontend connected to an unverified, informal backend doesn't deliver end-to-end high confidence.
CompCert... stands as a prime example of a fully verified compiler down to assembly... achieving a level of end-to-end confidence far exceeding what's described here.
Final Takeaway / Relevance
Ignore