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Yeah, but with all respect, that is a totally uninteresting property in an enterprise software system where almost no software bugs actually manifest as non-termination.

The critical bugs here are related to security (DDoS attacks, authorization and authentication, data exfiltration, etc), concurrency, performance, data corruption, transactionality and so forth. Most enterprise systems are distributed or at least concurrent systems which depend on several components like databases, distributed lock managers, transaction managers, and so forth, where developing a proper formal spec is a monumental task and possibly impossible to do in a meaningful way because these systems were not initially developed with formal verification in mind. The formal spec, if faithful, will have to be huge to capture all the weird edge cases.

Even if you had all that, you need to actually formulate important properties of your application in a formal language. I have no idea how to even begin doing that for the vast majority of the work I do.

Proving the correctness of linear programs using techniques such as Hoare logic is hard enough already for anything but small algorithms. Proving the correctness of concurrent programs operating on complex data structures requires much more advanced techniques, setting up complicated logical relations and dealing with things like separation logic. It's an entirely different beast, and I honestly do not see LLMs as a panacea that will suddenly make these things scale for anything remotely close in size to a modern enterprise system.



Oh, there's lots more simple properties you can state and prove that capture a lot more, even in the challenging enterprise setting.

I just gave the simplest example I could think of.

And termination is actually a much stronger and more useful property than you make it out to be---in the face of locks and concurrency.




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