dafny VS SharpLab

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.

Do these all compile to the exact same thing?

https://sharplab.io/#v2:CYLg1APgAgTAjAWAFBQMwAJboMLoN7LpHoCW...

Yes, so you are right.

Recently, while creating some experimental C# source code generators (xafero/csharp-generators), I was just concatenating strings together. Like you do, you know, if things have to go very quickly. If you have a simple use case, use a formatted multi-line string or some template library like scriban. But I searched for a way to generate more and more complicated logic easily - like for example, adding raw SQL handler methods to my pre-generated DBSet-like classes for my ADO.NET experiment. You could now say: Use Roslyn and that's really fine if you look everything up in a website like SharpLab, which shows immediately the syntax tree of our C# code.

One results in MOVSX, the other in MOVZX [1]. The difference thus is sign/zero extension when moving to the larger register. However, they seem to perform pretty much identical if I'm reading Agner Fog's instruction tables correctly.

[1] https://sharplab.io/#v2:C4LghgzgtgPgAgJgIwFgBQcDMACR2DC2A3ut...

If you don't have an IDE, you can use SharpLab.io or dotnet fiddle

The closest online tool I can think of would be SharpLab, but you can only choose between Roslyn's git branches instead of C# versions.

Your code is destructuring two properties and discarding one of them. It doesn't work with a single property: https://sharplab.io/#v2:C4LgTgrgdgNAJiA1AHwAICYAMBYAUBgRj2Nw...

I think that records don't generate a deconstruct method when they only have one property, but even if you manually define one you'll get an error on `var (varName) = ...`

- LinqPad is great and I love, but, IMO, it is not the best tool to start with. It does not provide intellisense or debugger in the free version. Assuming you do not want to pay for this licence just to play a little with the language, I'd suggest https://sharplab.io/. It is not as powerfull as LinqPad, but at least it gives you suggestions.