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> Who hires people to work in theorem provers, or using languages allowing proofs alongside code?

The military, aerospace industry and once in a while the medical industry will require provable code. Certain components need to be validated by frameworks like SPARK written in Ada. F* and Idris are pretty close to real-world usable in the capacity you're referring to. Those and ATS are probably the most 'real world' other than Ada/Spark. Other than that it's mostly universities and research facilities.

Another Microsoft Research project (I've said it once, I'm going to say it a million times more - hate on them all you want - it's not Google, Facebook, or Apple that's the Bell Labs of our generation - it's Microsoft) has a formal C verifier[1] which is paired in Z3, but I'm not sure if you could enforce an invariant like ensuring only a certain type of memory fragmentation. This Microsoft Research paper[2] strangely enough might be relevant re: memory alloc guarantees.

Other than that,'who hires people' ? Universities (INRIA of OCaml/Coq/Smalltalk Pharo fame probably at the forefront, that Swiss uni likely second edit: ETH Zurich is apparently ranked significantly higher than Jusseiu, mea culpa) Institutions like the Max Planck and Microsoft Research, Cambridge UK tend to hire people in a purely research-for-the-sake-of-research capacity which is exceedingly rare in the climate of only-think-about-this-quarters-profitability. I think JetBrains was doing some work with MPS that was really interesting though not quite in the vein of formal verification.

[1] https://vcc.codeplex.com/ [2] A Precise Yet Efficient Memory Model For C. Ernie Cohen, Michał Moskal, Wolfram Schulte, Stephan Tobies. 4th International Workshop on Systems Software Verification (SSV2009).



> it's not Google, Facebook, or Apple that's the Bell Labs of our generation - it's Microsoft

That is quite true, the amount of research they put out in OS, programming languages and distributed systems is quite impressive.

They are the ones that have invested more in doing OSes in more safer programming languages or tooling.

Also many don't realize how quite a few main contributors of their beloved open source languages are actually on MSR payroll.


> The military, aerospace industry and once in a while the medical industry will require provable code.

Not in the US... but in France, sure.


Good answers. I think Microsoft has tools that integrate into C# like tgey used for VerveOS. Coq extracts to ML's that could be converted to F# probably. So, even they have options that were practical enough for both an OS and their hypervisor.




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