Translation Validation: From SIGNAL to C

• Authors: Amir Pnueli;Ofer Shtrichman;Michael Siegel
• Venue: Correct System Design, Recent Insight and Advances, (to Hans Langmaack on the occasion of his retirement from his professorship at the University of Kiel)
• Year: 1999

Translation validation is an alternative to the verification of translators (compilers, code generators). Rather than proving in advance that the compiler always produces a target code which correctly implements the source code (compiler verification), each individual translation (i.e. a run of the compiler) is followed by a validation phase which verifies that the target code produced on this run correctly implements the submitted source program. In order to be a practical alternative to compiler verification, a key feature of this validation is its full automation. Since the validation process attempts to "unravel" the transformation effected by the translators, its task becomes increasingly more difficult (and necessary) with the increase of sophistication and variety of the optimizations methods employed by the translator. In this paper we address the practicability of translation validation for highly optimizing, industrial code generators from Signal, a widely used synchronous language, to C. We introduce new abstraction techniques as part of the automation of our approach.