Formal Methods for the Informal Engineer (FMIE) was a workshop held at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2021 to explore the potential role of verified software in the biomedical software ecosystem. The motivation for organizing FMIE was the recognition that the life sciences and medicine are undergoing a transition from being passive consumers of software and AI/ML technologies to fundamental drivers of new platforms, including those which will need to be mission and safety-critical. Drawing on conversations leading up to and during the workshop, we make five concrete recommendations to help software leaders organically incorporate tools, techniques, and perspectives from formal methods into their project planning and development trajectories.

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, arbitraryprecision arithmetic, and compiler bootstrapping.