Verified Extraction for Coq

Abstract:

Interactive theorem provers allow for the development, in the same environment, of
programs and of proofs about them. The programmatic portion of the development
can then be extracted to code which is then compiled into an executable. However,
unless both the extraction and compilation processes are formally verified, one has
no guarantees that the proofs developed still apply to the resulting executable. This
thesis describes my work on CertiCoq, a verified extraction pipeline for the Coq
theorem prover composing with the CompCert C verified compiler to achieve end-toend correctness guarantees.
I present a proof framework to prove optimizations over the continuation-passing
style (CPS) intermediate representation (IR) used in CertiCoq. This framework has
been used by me and others to prove the correctness of nontrivial optimizations. I
focus on a novel proof of correctness for a shrink reduction algorithm, a transformation
combining in a single pass multiple optimizations which always result in smaller terms.
I also present a verified code generation translating the CPS IR into Clight, a
front-end language of CompCert. I show how it interfaces with a verified garbage
collector and how its proof composes with the proof of correctness of CompCert.
Taken together, this thesis shows how carefuly crafted intermediate languages
facilitate verification effort in the context of an optimizing compiler.