Formal Verification of a C Compiler Front-end

Sandrine Blazy (1, 2, 3) , Zaynah Dargaye , Xavier Leroy (1, 2)

1 INRIA Rocquencourt
2 CRISTAL - Typed programming, modularity and compilation
3 CEDRIC - Centre d'études et de recherche en informatique et communications

This paper presents the formal verification of a compiler front-end that translates a subset of the C language into the Cminor intermediate language. The semantics of the source and target languages as well as the translation between them have been written in the specification language of the Coq proof assistant. The proof of observational semantic equivalence between the source and generated code has been machine-checked using Coq. An executable compiler was obtained by automatic extraction of executable Caml code from the Coq specification of the translator, combined with a certified compiler back-end generating PowerPC assembly code from Cminor, described in previous work.

Mots clés: spécifications formelles; sémantique formelle; assistant à la preuve; langage impératif

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Sandrine Blazy, Zaynah Dargaye, Xavier Leroy. Formal Verification of a C Compiler Front-end. FM'06: 14th Symposium on Formal Methods, Aug 2006, Hamilton, Canada. pp.460-475, ⟨10.1007/11813040_31⟩. ⟨inria-00106401⟩