Comment by addaon

14 hours ago

As with Spark, proving properties over a subset of the language is sufficient. Code is written to be verified; we won’t be verifying interesting properties of large chunks of legacy code in my career span. The C (near-) subset of C++ is (modulo standard libraries) a starting point for this; just adding on templates for type system power (and not for other exotic uses) goes a long way.

4 comments

addaon

Reply
jesse__  4 hours ago

> The C (near-) subset of C++ is (modulo standard libraries) a starting point for this; just adding on templates for type system power (and not for other exotic uses) goes a long way.

In my experience, this is absolutely true. I wrote my own metaprogramming frontend for C and that's basically all you need. At this point, I consider the metaprogramming facilities of a language it's most important feature, by far. Everything else is pretty much superfluous by comparison

extrabajs  6 hours ago

I don’t think this is a good comparison. Ada (on which Spark is based) has every safety feature and guardrail under the sun, while C++ (or C) has nothing.