Forscape VS dafny

And if you like mathematical languages, you should check out Forscape :)

You can use the free GitHub runners to execute regression tests on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I recommend testing with 32bit compilation as well as 64bit- it has a way of smoking out bugs. You could take a look at the GitHub actions on my Forscape repo in the .github folder, although it's probably not the most idiomatic runner scripting, but it is a C++ project like yours.

When I was developing a typesetting text editor for Forscape, I struggled to get traction until stumbling on the following plan: 1) Implement the document data structure and get it rendering to the screen 2) Support non-mutating interactions, such as clicking to move the text cursor, selecting, copying, etcetera 3) Support mutating interactions, such as keyboard input, deleting, and pasting. You'll probably use the Command pattern to support undo/redo of mutations

The project is Forscape, although the language part is made a bit complicated because a goal of the project is creating an editor that supports typeset code with IDE interaction

Finally adding multi-file support to Forscape. The frontend UI aspects are completed and I'm quite happy with the result. The app is Unicode heavy and QString's UTF-16 encoding is an annoyance; I would much prefer if Qt relied on std::string even. But the signal/slot mechanism lets you achieve some complicated behaviour with minimal complexity, and Qt looks great.

Here's an example from a project. The first step installs Qt, the second step clones my repo on the runner, then a bit more setup with Conan, then building and running.

I've been working on the Key CAS project (Imgur Screenshot), CAS being an acronym for Computer Algebra System, and "Key" a judiciously chosen title. This was my third time attempting CAS- this iteration was a huge improvement, but I still find it to be a damn hard problem. The GUI comes from the open source project Forscape, a scientific computing environment written in C++.

It gets fun when you go beyond flat symbols and start supporting 2D notation, like fractions and matrices. Probably not worth the hassle for most things, but I think it makes matrix expressions more compact with better readability.

I've been working on a mathematical programming language, Forscape. Currently it's entirely numerical, but I'm building a CAS separately which I hope to use in the language.

Forscape is a scientific computing language in development. It supports first-class matrices and common matrix operations. The language reached a milestone when it achieved similar performance to other prominent scientific langs on a computationally involved numerical problem from my graduate school years. At this point, I am unsure where the development should go next and I would appreciate advice. What do you find missing in scientific computing languages? What are essential features that you need/enjoy?

Code correctness is a lost art. I requirement to think in abstractions is what scares a lot of devs to avoid it. The higher abstraction language (formal specs) focus on a dedicated language to describe code, whereas lower abstractions (code contracts) basically replace validation logic with a better model.

C# once had Code Contracts[1]; a simple yet powerful way to make formal specifications. The contracts was checked at compile time using the Z3 SMT solver[2]. It was unfortunately deprecated after a few years[3] and once removed from the .NET Runtime it was declared dead.

The closest thing C# now have is probably Dafny[4] while the C# dev guys still try to figure out how to implement it directly in the language[5].

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/code-contra...

[2] https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/CodeContracts

[4] https://github.com/dafny-lang/dafny

[5] https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/105

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/).

Dafny and Whiley are two examples with explicit verification support. Idris and other dependently typed languages should all be rich enough to express the required predicate but might not necessarily be able to accept a reasonable implementation as proof. Isabelle, Lean, Coq, and other theorem provers definitely can express the capability but aren't going to churn out much in the way of executable programs; they're more useful to guide an implementation in a more practical functional language but then the proof is separated from the implementation, and you could also use tools like TLA+.

https://dafny.org/

https://whiley.org/

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://isabelle.in.tum.de/

https://leanprover.github.io/

https://coq.inria.fr/

http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html

> I think we can assume it won't be as efficient has hand written code

Actually, surprisingly, not necessarily the case!

If you'll refer to the discussion in https://github.com/dafny-lang/dafny/issues/601 and in https://github.com/dafny-lang/dafny/issues/547, Dafny can statically prove that certain compiler branches are not possible and will never be taken (such as out-of-bounds on index access, logical assumptions about whether a value is greater than or less than some other value, etc). This lets you code in the assumptions (__assume in C++ or unreachable_unchecked() under rust) that will allow the compiler to optimize the codegen using this information.

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.