Pragmatic Approaches to Improving Compiler Correctness
The article discusses pragmatic strategies for enhancing compiler correctness, focusing on practical methods and approaches to identify and reduce compiler bugs. It highlights techniques such as testing, formal verification, and fuzzing to improve reliability in compiler implementations.
Background
This talk addresses how to make compilers less buggy, a problem that affects every developer who uses a compiled language. Compilers are enormously complex — LLVM alone contains millions of lines of code — and they translate human-written code into machine instructions, so a compiler bug can silently break safety-critical software (medical devices, aircraft, financial systems) or introduce security vulnerabilities. Historically, bugs were caught by brute-force testing (compile random programs, see if they crash) or by formal verification (mathematical proof of correctness, as done for the CompCert C compiler). The speaker, likely an academic or experienced engineer, argues for "pragmatic" middle-ground approaches that are more practical than full formal verification but more rigorous than random testing. The paper is presented at ICOOOLPS 2026, a workshop (part of ECOOP) focused on implementation, compilation, and optimization of object-oriented languages.
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