this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Programming
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You should look into Coq as it seems to have some good traction.
https://coq.inria.fr/
What would be ELI5 use case of this? It has been almost a decade since I did anything math-formal in college, and I wonder what would be some practical uses or situations is SW dev where you should turn to this language.
EDIT: I skimmed the intro to Verifiable C, and I think I vaguely understand the idea - do I get it right, that the point is to basically create a formal definition of the function you are writing, i.e if you have a function that takes an array and sorts it, you'd have something like
And then you define this formal definiton in CoQ, then somehow convert your code into CoQ code it can accept it as F(a), and CoQ will try to proove formally that the function behavior is correct?
So, it's basically more robust Unit Testing that's backed by formal math proofs?
Right, in effect you break down the possible function states along with a more rigorous form of targeted unit testing.
I don’t believe they used coq, but the sel4 Linux kernel is one of the most famous formally verified applications/systems.
https://github.com/seL4/l4v
The way to beat vulnerabilities is to use formally verified building blocks in my opinion.