arXiv · 2509.21793
Compiling by Proving: Language-Agnostic Automatic Optimization from Formal Semantics
Abstract
Verification proofs encode complete program behavior, yet we discard them after checking correctness. We present compiling by proving, a paradigm that transforms these proofs into optimized execution rules. By constructing All-Path Reachability Proofs through symbolic execution and compiling their graph structure, we consolidate many semantic rewrites into single rules while preserving correctness by construction. We implement this as a language-agnostic extension to the K framework. Evaluation demonstrates performance improvements across different compilation scopes: opcode-level optimizations show consistent speedups, while whole-program compilation achieves orders of magnitude greater performance gains.
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Jianhong Zhao, Everett Hildenbrandt, Juan Conejero, Yongwang Zhao. 2025-09-26. Compiling by Proving: Language-Agnostic Automatic Optimization from Formal Semantics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21793
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