Prevalent software engineering practices have significantly increased the complexity and bloat of today's software. This in turn has led to a decrease in performance and an increase in security vulnerabilities. Chisel is a programming tool that aims to counter this trend.

Unlike conventional programming tools, which seek to preserve the program’s behavior, a hallmark of Chisel is to alter the program's behavior by removing unnecessary functionality. Chisel is addressing a multitude of research problems spanning how to specify the desired behavior, how to efficiently debloat programs, and what correctness guarantees to provide.

Chisel supports the C family of languages and is based on the Clang infrastructure.