Certified abstract machines for skeletal semantics

Abstract

Skeletal semantics is a framework to describe semantics of programming languages. We propose an automatic generation of a certified OCaml interpreter for any language written in skeletal semantics. To this end, we introduce two new interpretations, i.e., formal meanings, of skeletal semantics, in the form of non-deterministic and deterministic abstract machines. These machines are derived from the usual big-step interpretation of skeletal semantics using functional correspondence, a standard transformation from big-step evaluators to abstract machines. All these interpretations are formalized in the Coq proof assistant and we certify their soundness. We finally use the extraction from Coq to OCaml to obtain the certified interpreter.