Re:After 7 Months, Glasswing Overwelms Maintainers with Unde...
by xelxebar on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @09:58PM
(#50449279)
Formal verification is not magic. It can execute deductive proofs, but the relevance and utility of those results is an question of human values. Spec bugs are a thing. Bad design is a thing. Out-of-scope usage is a thing. Even a halting oracle won't help with those.
There is. But it will only be reliable if every transitive dependency of your codebase, all the way down to the hardware level, has been formally verified. Failing that, you have to rely on opaque contracts at the boundaries, and those are just promises that may be mistaken.
The Halting problem, Rice's theorem, etc. only apply if your goal is to automatically deduce properties or their violations for arbitrary programs. If your goal is simply to prove correctness properties for well understood classes of programs in industry, then there are no fundamental obstructions.