Formal certification of a compiler back-end or: programming a compiler with a proof assistant

  • Authors:
  • Xavier Leroy

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA Rocquencourt

  • Venue:
  • Conference record of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

This paper reports on the development and formal certification (proof of semantic preservation) of a compiler from Cminor (a C-like imperative language) to PowerPC assembly code, using the Coq proof assistant both for programming the compiler and for proving its correctness. Such a certified compiler is useful in the context of formal methods applied to the certification of critical software: the certification of the compiler guarantees that the safety properties proved on the source code hold for the executable compiled code as well.