Lessons from the JML Project

To have impact, a grand challenge should provide a way for diverse research to be integrated in a synergistic fashion. Synergy in the JML project comes from a shared specification language, and thus holds several lessons for the verifying compiler grand challenge. An important lesson is that the project should focus considerable resources on specification language design, which still contains many open research problems. Another important lesson is that, to support such a specification language, the project needs to involve groups doing research on extensible compilers and integrated development environments.