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I've been looking at incremental / partial formal verification based on 'assert'-like statements. Kani for rust has an interface close to what I imagine. But I'
by rocqua 1y ago
I've been looking at incremental / partial formal verification based on 'assert'-like statements. Kani for rust has an interface close to what I imagine. But I'd like to use deductive verification (something like hoare / seperation logic) instead.
This means the developer gets to decide what is important enough to try to assert. It's likely the developer will need to add sub-lemma's to get the assert to be proven, and I suspect some of these will need to be in the form of 'assumptions / requirements' at the start of a function, which then need to be confirmed at all call-sites.
A big downside here is that some things you'd like to prove often don't fit into boolean expressions in the underlying language. For example, universal / existential quantifiers aren't available (but are implicit in the formal prover, so can be hacked into). You also don't have predicates for 'this address has been allocated / initialized' nor any other predicates that let you say a value is constant. Similarly, there are no temporal quantifiers available.
I'm hoping that the above is not too limiting in practice. The fact that developers already user 'assert' statements does suggest that normal boolean expressions are already valuable.