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We have developed and mechanically verified an ML system called CakeML, which supports a substantial subset of Standard ML. CakeML is implemented as an interactive read-eval-print loop (REPL) in x86-64 machine code. Our correctness theorem ensures that this REPL implementation prints only those results permitted by the semantics of CakeML. Our verification effort touches on a breadth of topics including lexing, parsing, type checking, incremental and dynamic compilation, garbage collection, arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and compiler bootstrapping.

Our contributions are twofold. The first is simply in building a system that is end-to-end verified, demonstrating that each piece of such a verification effort can in practice be composed with the others, and ensuring that none of the pieces rely on any over-simplifying assumptions. The second is developing novel approaches to some of the more challenging …