
Formal Verification Tool Competitions - matt_d
https://alastairreid.github.io/verification-competitions/
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mpoteat
It's kind of a shame that this subset of research is kind of stuck on C as a
standard. I feel like higher abstraction languages would potentially be easier
to reason about, as well as personally more useful to me.

Sure I know C11 but it's just not a tool that solves the problems I'm
interested in.

~~~
adrianN
A lot of embedded code is written in C. A lot of safety critical code is
embedded code. This is unlikely to change in the next decade or two.

~~~
irundebian
The problem is that in safety critical contexts you are using special subsets
of C (e. g. like in MISRA C). I would probably make more sense to analyze
languages like Ada/SPARK or Rust which already have some safety considerations
respected in their designs.

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zomglings
Termination competitions seem fascinating.

Are they restricted to certain subclasses of programs where the Halting
Problem is solvable?

Or are they more focused on bounded termination - Will this general program
terminate in at most N steps? Are there techniques that help answer this
question in compressed time?

~~~
veselin
They overapproximate. This means that may say something probably doesn't
terminate even if it terminates. The idea is that if it says it terminates,
then there is a proof it does.

~~~
lou1306
Not necessarily. For instance, CBMC has been participating in the Termination
category with an approach based on Bounded model checking, an
underapproximation technique. Thus, they always produce correct result, but
their analysis might not terminate (or may terminate with an "unknown"
verdict).

