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The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later - Ivan Gavran

ivan-gavran.github.io · 1,503 words · saved by 1 readers

Engineers are getting excited about software verification! This may come as a surprise, since verification has long been considered useful only in very niche cases (at best; and impractical, useless or a complete waste of time at worst). Yet, the hype around it is clearly here: Google Trends shows a large spike in searches for formal verification/formal methods in the last two years, everybody’s learning Lean, new specification languages are popping up regularly, and there are efforts to verify major applications end-to-end (e.g., the Signal Shot project).

Engineers are getting excited about software verification! This may come as a surprise, since verification has long been considered useful only in very niche cases (at best; and impractical, useless or a complete waste of time at worst). Yet, the hype around it is clearly here: Google Trends shows a large spike in searches for formal verification/formal methods in the last two years, everybody’s learning Lean, new specification languages are popping up regularly, and there are efforts to verify major applications end-to-end (e.g., the Signal Shot project). The main driver of this excitement…

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