People often think of formal methods and theorem provers as forbidding tools, cool in theory but with a steep learning curve that makes them hard to use in real life. In this post, we’re going to describe a case we ran into recently where we were able to leverage theorem proving technology, Z3 in particular, to validate some real world engineering we were doing on the OCaml compiler. This post is aimed at readers interested in compilers, but assumes no familiarity with actual compiler devel...
