The End of History? Using a Proof Assistant to Replace Language Design with Library Design

Functionality of software systems has exploded in part because of advances in programming-language support for packaging reusable functionality as libraries. Developers benefit from the uniformity that comes of exposing many interfaces in the same language, as opposed to stringing together hodgepodges of command-line tools. Domain-specific languages may be viewed as an evolution of the power of reusable interfaces, when those interfaces become so flexible as to deserve to be called programming languages. However, common approaches to domain-specific languages give up many of the hard-won advantages of library-building in a rich common language, and even the traditional approach poses significant challenges in learning new APIs. We suggest that instead of continuing to develop new domain-specific languages, our community should embrace library-based ecosystems within very expressive languages that mix programming and theorem proving. Our prototype framework Fiat, a library for the Coq proof assistant, turns languages into easily comprehensible libraries via the key idea of modularizing functionality and performance away from each other, the former via macros that desugar into higher-order logic and the latter via optimization scripts that derive efficient code from logical programs

A framework for synthesizing transactional database implementations in a proof assistant

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 67-68).We propose CoqSQL, a framework for optimizing relational queries and automatically synthesizing relational database implementations in the Coq proof assistant, based on Anders Kaseorg's and Mohsen Lesani's Transactions framework. The synthesized codes support concurrent transaction execution on multiple processors and are accompanied with proofs certifying their correctness. The contributions include: (1) a complete specification of a subset of SQL queries and database relations, including support for indexes; and (2) an extensible, automated, and complete synthesis process from standard SQL-like specifications to executable concurrent programs.by Sorawit Suriyakarn.M. Eng

The end of history? Using a proof assistant to replace language design with library design

Functionality of software systems has exploded in part because of advances in programming language support for packaging reusable functionality as libraries. Developers benefit from the uniformity that comes of exposing many interfaces in the same language, as opposed to stringing together hodgepodges of command-line tools. Domain-specific languages may be viewed as an evolution of the power of reusable interfaces, when those interfaces become so flexible as to deserve to be called programming languages. However, common approaches to domain-specific languages give up many of the hard-won advantages of library-building in a rich common language, and even the traditional approach poses significant challenges in learning new APIs. We suggest that instead of continuing to develop new domain-specific languages, our community should embrace library-based ecosystems within very expressive languages that mix programming and theorem proving. Our prototype framework Fiat, a library for the Coq proof assistant, turns languages into easily comprehensible libraries via the key idea of modularizing functionality and performance away from each other, the former via macros that desugar into higher-order logic and the latter via optimization scripts that derive efficient code from logical programs.NSF (Grants CCF-1253229, CCF-1512611 and CCF-1521584)DARPA (Contracts FA8750-12-2-0293 and FA8750-16-C-0007