Comment by addaon

Poster here. I re-read this paper about once a year. I continue to think that it may be one of the most important papers I've read. As someone who works on high-reliability safety-critical real-time systems (automotive, avionics), being able to work in an environment where I could prove semantic properties of assembly code is pretty close to my dream -- the cost of demonstrating code correct is already so much higher than the cost of writing the code that the incremental cost of going to assembly seems minor, if there's even a small payback in time to demonstrate correctness. In practice, I think my dream language would be a relatively rich macro assembler plus a (guided, greedy) register allocator, designed entirely to simplify and allow semantic proofs. I don't really have a sense as to whether Coq (Rocq) is the right answer today, vs other options; or if there's a newer literature advancing this approach; but I'd truly love to see a deeper focus of making low level languages more useful in this space, rather than moving towards more constrained, higher level languages.