Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler? (2013) [pdf]

nickbenton.name

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 75 posts

Re: Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler? (2013) [pdf]

#4

Post by addaon »

Poster here. I re-read this paper about once a year. I continue to think that it may be one of the most important papers I've read. As someone who works on high-reliability safety-critical real-time systems (automotive, avionics), being able to work in an environment where I could prove semantic properties of assembly code is pretty close to my dream -- the cost of demonstrating code correct is already so much higher than the cost of writing the code that the incremental cost of going to assembly seems minor, if there's even a small payback in time to demonstrate correctness. In practice, I think my dream language would be a relatively rich macro assembler plus a (guided, greedy) register allocator, designed entirely to simplify and allow semantic proofs. I don't really have a sense as to whether Coq (Rocq) is the right answer today, vs other options; or if there's a newer literature advancing this approach; but I'd truly love to see a deeper focus of making low level languages more useful in this space, rather than moving towards more constrained, higher level languages.

Re: Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler? (2013) [pdf]

#7

Post by quanto »

This paper reminds me of a class assignment in grad school where the prof asked the students to write a compiler in Coq for some toy Turning-complete language in a week. Having no background in compiler design or functional programming, I found it daunting at first, but eventually managed it. The Coq language's rigor really helps with something like this.

I wonder if AI's compute graph would benefit from a language-level rigor as of Coq.

Re: Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler? (2013) [pdf]

#9

Post by kragen »

The canonical URL, dating back to at least 02015, may be http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pd..., which now redirects to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/coq-wor.... This site presumably belongs to the Nick Benton who is one of its authors.

Re: Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler? (2013) [pdf]

#10

Post by kragen »

addaon wrote: post #4

Poster here. I re-read this paper about once a year. I continue to think that it may be one of the most important papers I've read. As someone who works on high-reliability safety-critical real-time systems (automotive, avionics), being able to work in an environment where I could prove semantic properties of assembly code is pretty close to my dream -- the cost of demonstrating code correct is already so much higher…

Have you found Coq or other formal-methods tooling useful?
Post reply on HN