Case Study: DARPA achieves rapid, correct, and secure system development with FP Complete's Haskell solution

DARPA - Customer Case Study

FPComplete presents a case study of the DARPA SAFE/CRASH program, led by BAE Systems with partners at Harvard, Northeastern and Penn. The project’s goal was a clean‑slate, security‑focused system (OS, hardware, software and applications), but its complexity demanded code that was provably correct and easy to change—requirements that made conventional imperative languages impractical and runtime errors especially costly to diagnose.

The team chose Haskell and used it to build an ISA simulator and a parameterized assembler. Haskell’s terseness, strong type system, laziness and built‑in concurrency sped development, reduced testing effort, and simplified hardware integration. The result: many years of expected work condensed into two, a high‑quality, maintainable secure system, and functionality that would have been exceedingly difficult to achieve with Java or other imperative languages.

DARPA

Tom Hawkins

Principal Engineer