F* (pronounced F star) is a high-level, multi-paradigm, functional and object-oriented programming language inspired by the languages ML, Caml, and OCaml, and intended for program verification. It is a joint project of Microsoft Research, and the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria). Its type system includes dependent types, monadic effects, and refinement types. This allows expressing precise specifications for programs, including functional correctness and security properties. The F* type-checker aims to prove that programs meet their specifications using a combination of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solving and manual proofs. For execution, programs written in F* can be translated to OCaml, F#, C, WebAssembly (via KaRaMeL tool), or assembly language (via Vale toolchain). Prior F* versions could also be translated to JavaScript.
It was introduced in 2011. and is under active development on GitHub.
History
Versions
Until version 2022.03.24, F* was written entirely in a common subset of F* and F# and supported bootstrapping in both OCaml and F#. This was dropped starting in version 2022.04.02.56
Overview
Operators
F* supports common arithmetic operators such as +, -, *, and /. Also, F* supports relational operators like <, <=, ==, !=, >, and >=.7
Data types
Common primitive data types in F* are bool, int, float, char, and unit.8
Sources
- Ahman, Danel; Hriţcu, Cătălin; Maillard, Kenji; Martínez, Guido; Plotkin, Gordon; Protzenko, Jonathan; Rastogi, Aseem; Swamy, Nikhil (2017). "Dijkstra Monads for Free". 44nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages.
- Swamy, Nikhil; Hriţcu, Cătălin; Keller, Chantal; Rastogi, Aseem; Delignat-Lavaud, Antoine; Forest, Simon; Bhargavan, Karthikeyan; Fournet, Cédric; Strub, Pierre-Yves; Kohlweiss, Markulf; Zinzindohoue, Jean-Karim; Zanella-Béguelin, Santiago (2016). "Dependent Types and Multi-Monadic Effects in F*". 43nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages.
- Swamy, Nikhil; Martínez, Guido; Rastogi, Aseem (2024). Proof-Orented Programming in F*.
External links
References
"Microsoft Research Inria Joint Centre". MSR-INRIA. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/collaboration/inria-joint-centre/ ↩
Swamy, Nikhil; Chen, Juan; Fournet, Cédric; Strub, Pierre-Yves; Bhargavan, Karthikeyan; Yang, Jean (September 2011). Secure distributed programming with value-dependent types. ICFP '11: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming. Vol. 46. Tokyo, Japan: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 266–278. doi:10.1145/2034574.2034811. Retrieved 17 April 2023. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2034773.2034811 ↩
"The F* Project". Microsoft. Retrieved 20 April 2023. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/the-f-project/ ↩
"FStarLang/FStar". GitHub. Retrieved 23 April 2024. https://github.com/FStarLang/FStar ↩
"fstar.exe is no longer buildable in F# as a .NET executable #2512". Github. Retrieved 17 April 2023. https://github.com/FStarLang/FStar/pull/2512 ↩
"Consider dropping requirement that F* code has to be valid F# #1737". Github. Retrieved 17 April 2023. https://github.com/FStarLang/FStar/issues/1737 ↩
Swamy, Nikhil; Martínez, Guido; Rastogi, Aseem (Jan 14, 2024). Proof-Oriented Programming in F* (PDF). https://fstar-lang.org/tutorial/proof-oriented-programming-in-fstar.pdf ↩
Swamy, Nikhil; Martínez, Guido; Rastogi, Aseem (Jan 14, 2024). Proof-Oriented Programming in F* (PDF). https://fstar-lang.org/tutorial/proof-oriented-programming-in-fstar.pdf ↩