Formal verification of a realistic compiler

  • Authors:
  • Xavier Leroy

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, France

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM - Barbara Liskov: ACM's A.M. Turing Award Winner
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper reports on the development and formal verification (proof of semantic preservation) of CompCert, a compiler from Clight (a large subset of the C programming language) to PowerPC assembly code, using the Coq proof assistant both for programming the compiler and for proving its correctness. Such a verified compiler is useful in the context of critical software and its formal verification: the verification of the compiler guarantees that the safety properties proved on the source code hold for the executable compiled code as well.