In this article we answer this question by showing how the Nuprl proof development system and its rich type theory have contributed to the design of reliable, high-performance networks by synthesizing optimized code for application configurations of the Ensemble group communication toolkit.

We present a type-theoretical semantics of OCaml, the implementation language of Ensemble, and tools for automatically importing system code into the Nuprl system. We describe reasoning strategies for generating verifiably correct fast-path optimizations of application configurations that substantially reduce end-to-end latency in Ensemble. We also discuss briefly how to use Nuprl for checking configurations against specifications and for the design of reliable adaptive network protocols.