FStar VS eff

I don't think something that specific exists. There are a very large number of formal methods tools, each with different specialties / domains.

For verification with proof assistants, [Software Foundations](https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/) and [Concrete Semantics](http://concrete-semantics.org/) are both solid.

For verification via model checking, you can check out [Learn TLA+](https://learntla.com/), and the more theoretical [Specifying Systems](https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/book-02-08-08.pdf).

For more theory, check out [Formal Reasoning About Programs](http://adam.chlipala.net/frap/).

And for general projects look at [F*](https://www.fstar-lang.org/) and [Dafny](https://dafny.org/).

Don't get me wrong, there are times when Microsoft got it right the first time that was technically far superior to their competitors. Windows IOCP was theoretically capable of doing C10K as far back in 1994-95 when there wasn't any hardware support yet and UNIX world was bickering over how to do asynchronous I/O. Years later POSIX came up with select which was a shoddy little shit in comparison. Linux caved in finally only as recently as 2019 and implemented io_uring. Microsoft research has contributed some very interesting things to computer science like Z3 SAT solver and in collaboration with INRIA made languages like F* and Low* for formal specification and verification. But all this dwarfs in comparison to all the harm they did.

Most of the proof assistants out there: Lean, Coq, Dafny, Isabelle, F*, Idris 2, and Agda. And the main concepts are dependent types, Homotopy Type Theory AKA HoTT, and Category Theory. Warning: HoTT and Category Theory are really dense, you're going to really need to research them.

F* is a dependently typed language that can be transpiled to idiomatic C via the KReMLin compiler. It’s very ML-ish to write and you can leave out some proofs. It also has the benefit of being used to write a formally verified TLS implementation that’s in wide use throughout industry.

As I said, dependent types attempt to solve this problem. F* is a language where you can express complex logic as a type. The catch is, these types are checked by an SMT solver. If the solver can satisfy the type checking, then great, and you move on. If it can’t, you have no idea why, and either have to guess or manually write the proof anyway. Contrast this with Standard ML which has a proof of the soundness of its type system.

So kind of like F*? https://www.fstar-lang.org/

F*

Nevermind that academia has come up with far safer ways to do a few things but social norms & inertia prevent their wider adoption (well okay, it also has a barrier to entry in the education required to use it but I don't think someone with the knowledge to meaningfully contribute to an OS kernel can be considered uneducated nor unable to learn).

Maybe that's a little off topic here, but if you like fixing bugs, i suspect you might also enjoy showing that there are no bugs at all. Check out languages like F* https://www.fstar-lang.org/ It's a proof-oriented programming language. You can use it to write code that has no bugs at all. And you once you're done, can convert F* to C or other languages.

You can swap-out implementations for testing, avoid the crazy N^2 instances issues, etc. They're pretty cool. Currently there are many competing libraries. polysemy and eff both have good examples on their homepages.

Effect systems and Algebraic effects. ocaml has just released a stripped-down effect system. People are also working on Effect systems for Haskell (eff, fused-effects, effet). Koka is a language built with effects first and foremost and it’s rapidly gaining popularity. Unison also has effects.

There are also a few subtle issues that arise with delconts related to semantics of higher order effects (see here and here), but they might be solvable.

Details are in https://github.com/hasura/eff/issues/12 and https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/pywuqg/unresolved_challenges_of_scoped_effects_and_what/.

You'll get fearless parallel with STM in the mixture, and GHC is getting a work in progress effect system for Haskell, as Delimited continuation primops has been merged.

My last example is algebraic effects, some of which have been made possible in a both practical and efficient way thanks to extremely recent research, and that I can use to implement architectures like Ports and Adapters or Clean Architecture and have very maintainable code. (Extensible Effects — An Alternative to Monad Transformers was published in 2013, Effect Handlers in Scope was published in 2014 and they are behind Polysemy, while there is ongoing work on effects with even better performance, like Eff)

cleff's Eff monad is esentially implemented as a ReaderT IO. [...] This is first done by eff, [...]

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "eff"

Languages such as Koka only support algebraic effects, not scoping operations such as catch and listen. The Effect Handlers in Scope paper introduces scoping operations, which lead to the Haskell libraries fused-effects and polysemy, but they turned out to have some weird semantics. eff is her effort to fix that.

There are a few languages that have algebraic effect systems, most notably Haskell, but these systems are implemented as libraries, not baked into the language (which can have advantages and disadvantages).