Pancake is a research programming language currently under development at UNSW, Chalmers University, ANU, and Gothenburg University. It comes with a compiler that is verified correct using the HOL4 theorem prover, and is built from the ground up for predictable compilation and ease of verification.
The compiler is an optimising compiler going through many passes and intermediate languages, but there is scope to add many more to improve the quality and performance of generated code. Example improvements we're looking for include:
- Adding loops to the CakeML intermediate languages, to avoid the Pancake compiler having to perform tail recursion introduction to compile loops.
- Better instruction targeting.
- Inlining support for small functions.
- Further performance characterisation of the compiler, to identify other important compiler optimisations.
These are just examples; the precise contents of this topic needs to be negotiated with the supervisors.
School
Computer Science and Engineering
Research Area
Formal methods | Programming languages | Operating systems
- Research environment
- Expected outcomes
- Supervisory team
- Reference material/links
The Trustworthy Systems (TS) Group is the pioneer in formal (mathematical) correctness and security proofs of computer systems software. Its formally verified seL4 microkernel, now backed by the seL4 Foundation, is deployed in real-world systems ranging from defence systems via medical devices, autonomous cars to critical infrastructure. The group's vision is to make verified software the standard for security- and safety-critical systems. Core to this a focus on performance as well as making software verification more scalable and less expensive.
- Report outlining the approach taken, tradeoffs considered and work done.
- Pull request to the CakeML/Pancake github repository with an implementation and HOL4 formalisation.
