Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by AlotOfReading 216 days ago
There's a lot to unpack here. You can always make a stricter programming language by having your compiler error on everything.

Lisps are perfectly usable for system level code as well. There was an entire lineage of Lisp Machines where virtually all OS code was written in lisp. Those probably could have used ACL2 had it existed.

There's an X-Y component to your questions though. The strictness of the programming language just isn't the main goal for OS formal verification. It just makes certain things easier. What's important is having executable semantics of the programming language, having a machine model, and a behavioral specification. All of these are typically written in proof languages, and the kernel code is proven to implement the behavior spec according to the machine and language semantics.

SPARK gives you executable semantics, but so do C (specifically the Clight subset), most of the Lisps, Rust, and many others. You're benefiting from certain errors being impossible in SPARK, but it's not a fundamentally different process.