Why safety-critical aerospace software relies on mathematically proven compilers to prevent code generation bugs.
Standard compilers (GCC, Clang) contain millions of lines of code and occasionally introduce subtle machine-code generation errors, especially when aggressive optimization flags (-O3) are enabled.
CompCert is written in the Coq formal proof assistant. Its code generation passes are accompanied by mathematical proofs guaranteeing that the produced assembly code behaves identically to the C source code semantics.
Utilizing a formally verified compiler allows aerospace developers to eliminate costly manual assembly-level verification required under DO-178C DAL A Table A-7, saving thousands of engineering hours.