Carnap Ten Years Later: Lessons Learned and Next Steps

Abstract

The first part of this paper provides an experience report, recounting the design and long-term maintenance of the Carnap proof assistant framework used cumulatively by over 45,000 students worldwide over the last decade. We cover the good, the bad, and the ugly: what worked well, what didn't work, and what added friction to development and maintenance over time. These insights motivate a bottom-up redesign of the Carnap framework, which is the topic of the paper's second part. Briefly, the new design combines a new high-performance verifier kernel (mm0-zig) targeting Mario Carneiro's metamath zero format, and the Aufbau Bytecode Compiler, (abc), a new proof compiler that can serve as a backend for richly interactive proof-authoring experiences on the web.