Formal verification debate: narrowing code search space to the verifiable 1%
jd_pressman · x · 2026-10-23
jdpressman and lusichu debate the practical difficulty of formal verification: starting from the kernel breaks downstream compatibility, while insisting on compatibility forces hard-to-prove patterns. Still, narrowing the search space to only verifiable programs — likely 1% of code — would be a massive improvement. He also argues the intuition that formal verification is infeasible is outdated: academic advances in verification tooling have been steady; they were just too labor-intensive to apply at scale.
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