Verus seems to be exactly what I have been looking for! I discovered AllConcur[0] on HN a while back, and I wanted to port it to Go, but since it used TLA+ and C, and it was very confusing for me to understand how you can trust the implementation unless you can compile TLA+ to C.
I was talking to Gemini about comparing Verus to TLA+ and it said that TLA+ is usually used (for example) "to prove that a distributed consensus protocol is logically sound" but when I asked if Verus can do that too, it said yes. So Verus can be compiled and integrated with Rust, whereas TLA+ is used more for blueprint development that then guides the implementation in the mind of the implementer.
Seems awesome!
This seems like a big deal
What if the 'mathematical specification of its functionality' is incorrect? How to prove the correctness of the mathematical specification?
IMO, formal verification is never going to work. It's very clear that a lot of people are desperate to see it used in mainstream software development, but every innovation which proponents have seen as an opportunity to finally prove its utility has only served to further discredit it.
Now proponents are at a point that they literally have to convince us that people who aren't able to write correct code are somehow able to write correct mathematical specifications!
This is quite an extraordinary claim given that the mathematical specification is an order of magnitude longer and more complex than the code itself... And every experienced software engineer knows that mistakes grow proportionally to the size of the logic... Unfortunately, mathematical spec is logic; just like code, except it's more complex and thus more error-prone.
That's fascinating. Does it mean it verifies mathematical proofs directly within the Rust code? Does anyone know the underlying principles of how this is possible?
https://verus-lang.github.io/verus/publications-and-projects... - The papers here go into their implementation. They take the proof statements and information about the program and turn it into an SMT problem (and run it through Z3 if I read correctly) and then they use that to prove the properties of the program.
SPARK/Ada and Dafny work similarly, and have good documentation if you want to try your hand at something with a (presently) better set of documentation.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546232/program-proofs/ - Dafny book, pretty good tutorial on the topic
https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-spark/chapters/01... - Free tutorial for SPARK
All it does is dispatch proof obligations to an SMT solver like Z3. There is nothing special about Verus, it works in the same way other program verification frameworks like Dafny and Frama-C work - except it's for Rust. Most of this article presents nothing unique to Verus and is more of an advertisement for the authors research work and the other work AWS is doing.
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