The Shape of Code

There’s a new paper out claiming to be about a formally-verified C compiler, it even states a Theorem about its abilities! If this paper appeared as part of a Soap powder advert the Advertising Standards Authority would probably require clarification of the claims. What clarifications might appear in the small print tucked away at the bottom of the ad?

1. C source code is not verified directly, it is first translated to the formal notations used by the verification system; the software that performs this translation is assumed to be correct.
2. The CompCert system may successfully translate programs containing undefined behavior. Any proof statements made about such programs may not be valid.
3. The support tools are assumed to be correct; primarily the Coq proof assistant, which is written in OCaml.
4. The CompCert system makes decisions about implementation dependent behaviors and any proofs only apply in the context of these decisions.
5. The CompCert system makes decisions about unspecified behaviors and any proofs only apply in the context of these decisions.

Some notes on the small print:

The C source translator used by CompCert rarely gets mentioned in any of the published papers; what was done to check its accuracy (I have previously discussed some options)? Presumably the developers who wrote it tried very hard to make sure they did a good job, just like the authors of f2c, a Fortran to C translator, did. Connecting f2c as a front-end of the CompCert system gives us a verified Fortran compiler! I think the f2c translator is much more likely to be correct than the CompCert C source translator, it has been used by a lot more people, processed a lot more source and maintained over a longer period.

When they encounter undefined behavior in source code production C compilers sometimes generate code that has very unexpected behavior. Using the CompCert system will not avoid unexpected behavior in these situations; CompCert simply washes its hands for this kind of code and says all bets are off.

Proving the support tools correct would simply move the assumption of correctness to a different set of tools. I am not aware of any major effort to test whether the Coq system behaves as intended, but have not read all the papers describing it (the list of reported faults is does not appear to be publicly available); bugs have been found in the OCaml implementation.

Like all compilers that generate code, CompCert has to make implementation dependent decisions and select one of the possible unspecified behaviors. The C-Semantics tool generates all unspecified behaviors, rather than just one.