Verified Compilation and Optimization of Floating-Point Programs in CakeML

Paper in proceeding, 2022

Verified compilers such as CompCert and CakeML have become increasingly realistic over the last few years, but their support for floating-point arithmetic has thus far been limited. In particular, they lack the “fast-math-style” optimizations that unverified mainstream compilers perform. Supporting such optimizations in the setting of verified compilers is challenging because these optimizations, for the most part, do not preserve the IEEE-754 floating-point semantics. However, IEEE-754 floating-point numbers are finite approximations of the real numbers, and we argue that any compiler correctness result for fast-math optimizations should appeal to a real-valued semantics rather than the rigid IEEE-754 floating-point numbers. This paper presents RealCake, an extension of CakeML that achieves end-to-end correctness results for fast-math-style optimized compilation of floating-point arithmetic. This result is achieved by giving CakeML a flexible floating-point semantics and integrating an external proof-producing accuracy analysis. RealCake's end-to-end theorems relate the I/O behavior of the original source program under real-number semantics to the observable I/O behavior of the compiler generated and fast-math-optimized machine code.