Section: Research Program

Practical experiments

The first three axes of the EPC Gallinette aim at developing a new generation of proof assistants. But we strongly believe that foundational investigations must go hand in hand with practical experiments. Therefore, we expect to benefit from existing expertise and collaborations in the team to experiment our extensions of Coq on real world developments. It should be noticed that those practical experiments are strongly guided by the deep history of research on software engineering of team members.

Certified Code Refactoring

In the context of refactoring of C programs, we intend to formalise program transformations that are written in an imperative style to test the usability of our addition of effects in the proof assistant. This subject has been chosen based on the competence of members of the team.

We are currently working on the formalisation of refactoring tools in Coq [45]. Automatic refactoring of programs in industrial languages is difficult because of the large number of potential interactions between language features that are difficult to predict and to test. Indeed, all available refactoring tools suffer from bugs : they fail to ensure that the generated program has the same behaviour as the input program. To cope with that difficulty, we have chosen to build a refactoring tool with Coq : a program transformation is written in the Coq programming language, then proven correct on all possible inputs, and then an OCaml executable program is generated by the platform. We rely on the CompCert C formalisation of the C language. CompCert is currently the most complete formalisation of an industrial language, which justifies that choice. We have three goals in that project :

• Build a refactoring tool that programmers can rely on and make it available in a popular platform (such as Eclipse, IntelliJ or Frama-C).

• Explore large, drastic program transformations such as replacing a design architecture for an other one, by applying a sequence of small refactoring operations (as we have done for Java and Haskell programs before [48], [44], [31]), while ensuring behaviour preservation.

• Explore the use of enhancements of proof systems on large developments. For instance, refactoring tools are usually developed in the imperative/object paradigm, so the extension of Coq with side effects or with object features proposed in the team can find a direct use-case here.

Certified Constraint Programming

We plan to make use of the internalisation of the object-oriented paradigm in the context of constraint programming. Indeed, this domain is made of very complex algorithms that are often developed using object-oriented programming (as it is the case for instance for CHOCO, which is developed in the Tasc Group at IMT Atlantique, Nantes). We will in particular focus on filtering algorithms in constraint solvers, for which research publications currently propose new algorithms with manual proofs. Their formalisation in Coq is challenging. Another interesting part of constraint solving to formalise is the part that deals with program generation (as opposed to extraction). However, when there are numerous generated pieces of code, it is not realistic to prove their correctness manually, and it can be too difficult to prove the correctness of a generator. So we intend to explore a middle path that consists in generating a piece of code along with its corresponding proof (script or proof term). A target application could be interval constraints (for instance Allen interval algebra or region connection calculus) that can generate thousands of specialised filtering algorithms for a small number of variables [37].

Finally, Rémi Douence has already worked (articles publishing [64], [98], [54], PhD Thesis advising [99]) with different members of the Tasc team. Currently, he supervises with Nicolas Beldiceanu the PhD Thesis of Ekaterina Arafailova in the Tasc team. She studies finite transducers to model time-series constraints [38], [36], [35]. This work requires proofs, manually done for now, we would like to explore when these proofs could be mechanised.

Certified Symbolic Computation

We will investigate how the addition of effects in the Coq proof assistant can facilitate the marriage of computer algebra with formal proofs. Computer algebra systems on one hand, and proof assistants on the other hand, are both designed for doing mathematics with the help of a computer, by the means of symbolic computations. These two families of systems are however very different in nature: computer algebra systems allow for implementations faithful to the theoretical complexity of the algorithms, whereas proof assistants have the expressiveness to specify exactly the semantic of the data-structures and computations.

Experiments have been run that link computer algebra systems with Coq [53], [43]. These bridges rely on the implementation of formal proof-producing core algorithms like normalisation procedures. Incidentally, they require non trivial maintenance work to survive the evolution of both systems. Other proof assistants like the Isabelle/HOL system make use of so-called reflection schemes: the proof assistant can produce code in an external programming language like SML, but also allows to import the values output by these extracted programs back inside the formal proofs. This feature extends the trusted base of code quite significantly but it has been used for major achievements like a certified symbolic/numeric ODE solver [70].

We would like to bring Coq closer to the efficiency and user-friendliness of computer algebra systems: for now it is difficult to use the Coq programming language so that certified implementations of computer algebra algorithms have the right, observable, complexity when they are executed inside Coq. We see the addition of effects to the proof assistant as an opportunity to ease these implementations, for instance by making use of caching mechanisms or of profiling facilities. Such enhancements should enable the verification of computation-intensive mathematical proofs that are currently beyond reach, like the validation of Helfgott's proof of the weak Goldbach conjecture [66].