A concrete memory model for CompCert

Abstract

Semantics preserving compilation of low-level C programs is challenging because their semantics is implementation defined according to the C standard. This paper presents the proof of an enhanced and more concrete memory model for the CompCert C compiler which assigns a definite meaning to more C programs. In our new formally verified memory model, pointers are still abstract but are nonetheless mapped to concrete 32-bit integers. Hence, the memory is finite and it is possible to reason about the binary encoding of pointers. We prove that the existing memory model is an abstraction of our more concrete model thus validating formally the soundness of CompCert’s abstract semantics of pointers. We also show how to adapt the front-end of CompCert thus demonstrating that it should be feasible to port the whole compiler to our novel memory model.