Comment by amoss
15 hours ago
What is the program?
There are two different answers to this question, and which one is "correct" depends entirely on the context of who is asking it.
1. It's the code that is specific to this program that sits above the run-time layer (internal view, that most programmers would take).
2. It's the code in the binary that is executed (external view, that most users would take).
The key question does not seem to be "was the proof correct", rather "did the proof cover everything in the program". The answer depends on whether you are looking at it from the perspective of a programmer, or a user. Given the overly strong framing that the article is responding to - highlighting the difference in this way does seem to be useful. The title is correct from the perspective that most users would take.
Yes but, without wishing to be snarky, did you read the article? There is no program as such, in either sense - the announcement from Lean only mentions "a C compression library" (zlib). Not only that, but since we're talking about formal verification, a programmer would likely understand that that is about proving a bounded, specific codebase at source code level, and not operating on a binary along with its associated dependencies (again caveat my limited understanding of these things).
My feeling is that if you told the average non-technical user that some person/organisation had produced a formally verified version of a C compression library, you would likely get a blank look, so I think it's reasonable to assume that both Lean's intended audience, and the audience of the blog post linked here, correspond with number 1. in your list.
The article describes fuzzing the library, this execution requires a program to be compiled. Typically fuzzing involves a minimal harness around the payload (a single call into the library in this case). There is clearly a bug in this program, and it does not exist in the minimal harness. It must be in the library code, which was covered by the proof.
The bounded, specific codebase that you refer to is typically the library *and all of its dependencies*, which in this case includes the Lean runtime. This is why formal verification is difficult: the proof chain needs to extend all the way down to the foundations. In this case the original gushing claim that everything was verified is incorrect and premature. The article seems like a good exposition of why.
Thank you, I understand what fuzzing is; that test harness was presumably provided either by the blog post author or generated by Claude somehow, and therefore would not have been part of the proven code, nor part of the original claim by the Lean devs. That's what I meant by saying there is no program as such.
> The bounded, specific codebase that you refer to is typically the library and all of its dependencies, which in this case includes the Lean runtime.
How does that work? I thought the main idea is to write code in the Lean language which has some specific shape conducive to mathematical analysis, along with mathematical proofs that operate on that code. How then does a system like this handle a third party dependency? I've searched around and I can't find any information about how it works. I assumed that the boundary of the proof was the source code - surely they can't also be proving things like, say, DirectX?
> This is why formal verification is difficult: the proof chain needs to extend all the way down to the foundations.
The difficulty is not in explosions of computational complexity due to problems of incompleteness, decidability, the halting problem, those kinds of things? As I said this is not something I know much about but it's surprising to me if 'analysing all the code' is really the difficult bit.
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Gentle reminder about this excerpt from HN Guidelines:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Noted, thank you