Boogie vs CBMC

Boogie is a modeling language and tool for building program verifiers for other languages. It accepts Boogie language input, can optionally infer invariants, and generates verification conditions for an SMT solver. Z3 is the default solver; CVC5 and Yices2 support is experimental. The Civl extension lets users model concurrent and distributed systems. Boogie is self-hosted and distributed as a.NET global tool through NuGet. It requires.NET and a supported SMT solver, and the NuGet listing identifies version 3.5.7 as targeting.NET 8.0 or higher. The project uses the MIT License and is free at free. The repository names VCC and HAVOC for C, along with Dafny, Chalice, Spec#, and Move verifiers, as projects built on Boogie. Yices2 has a stated constraint: it works for unquantified fragments such as arrays, arithmetic, and bitvectors, but not for quantifiers, generalized arrays, or datatypes. Users can ask questions or report issues through the project issue tracker, and contributions are accepted through pull requests.

CBMC is a bounded model checker for C and C++ programs. It explores execution paths to check assertions, including array bounds, pointer safety, exceptions, and some undefined behavior such as signed integer overflow. Its analysis unwinds loops before sending the resulting equation to a decision procedure, and inputs may need a bounded size. The repository lists C89, C99, most of C11, C17, C23, GCC and Visual Studio extensions, and SystemC through Scoot; the listed input languages also include Java bytecode. CBMC supports contracts and can produce counterexamples. Its incremental SMT2 backend works with SMT-LIB 2.6-compliant solvers, with Z3 and CVC5 as examples. Distribution options include Homebrew instructions for macOS, Ubuntu DEB packages, Windows MSI installers, and Docker images. goto-cc can replace gcc or cl.exe in Makefiles to collect project models. The guide discusses routine development and continuous integration use. CBMC is free under the 4-clause BSD license.