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The Design and Implementation of a Certifying Compiler (1998)
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BibTeX
@MISC{Necula98thedesign,
author = {George C. Necula and Peter Lee},
title = { The Design and Implementation of a Certifying Compiler},
year = {1998}
}
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Abstract
This paper presents the design and implementation of a com-piler that translates programs written in a type-safe subset of the C programming language into highly optimized DEC Alpha assembly language programs, and a certifier that automatically checks the type safety and memory safety of any assembly language program produced by the compiler. The result of the certifier is either a formal proof of type safety or a counterexample pointing to a potential violation of the type system by the target program. The ensemble of the compiler and the certifier is called a certifying compiler. Several advantages of certifying compilation over previous approaches can be claimed. The notion of a certify-ing compiler is significantly easier to employ than a formal compiler verification, in part because it is generally easier to verify the correctness of the result of a computation than to prove the correctness of the computation itself. Also, the approach can be applied even to highly optimizing compilers, as demonstrated by the fact that our compiler generates target code, for a range of realistic C programs, which is competitive with both the cc and gee compilers with all op-timizations enabled. The certifier also drastically improves the effectiveness of compiler testing because, for each test case, it statically signals compilation errors that might oth-erwise require many executions to detect. Finally, this ap-proach is a practical way to produce the safety proofs for a Proof-Carrying Code system, and thus may be useful in a system for safe mobile code.
Keyphrases
certifying compiler type safety counterexample pointing certify-ing compiler realistic program target program safe mobile code gee compiler many execution memory safety formal compiler verification several advantage target code programming language proof-carrying code system formal proof compiler testing safety proof practical way compilation error potential violation assembly language program previous approach type system test case language program type-safe subset dec alpha
