Minuska: Towards a Formally Verified Programming Language Framework

TL;DR

Minuska is a formal framework that generates provably correct interpreters from language definitions, enhancing trustworthiness of language tools through formal semantics and proof assistant implementation.

Contribution

It introduces Minuska, a practical framework that ensures correctness of interpreters generated from formal language definitions using Coq.

Findings

Supports nontrivial languages with strong correctness guarantees

Uses Coq to implement and verify interpreters

Provides formal semantics for language definitions

Abstract

Programming language frameworks allow us to generate language tools (e.g., interpreters) just from a formal description of the syntax and semantics of a programming language. As these frameworks tend to be quite complex, an issue arises whether we can trust the generated tools. To address this issue, we introduce a practical formal programming language framework called Minuska, which always generates a provably correct interpreter given a valid language definition. This is achieved by (1) defining a language MinusLang for expressing programming language definitions and giving it formal semantics and (2) using the Coq proof assistant to implement an interpreter parametric in a MinusLang definition and to prove it correct. Minuska provides strong correctness guarantees and can support nontrivial languages while performing well. This is the extended version of the SEFM24 paper of the same name.