Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? (2019) | Hacker News

An engineer rewriting PostgreSQL in Rust used Kani to verify more than 1,000 functions against the C code.

The proof-based approach uncovered four cross-platform bugs in PostgreSQL’s C implementation, including parsing and overflow issues.

One bug involved inconsistent char hashing, and another could corrupt data in hash indexes.

The case shows how formal methods can catch real correctness problems in critical database software.