

F*: A Verifying ML Compiler for Distributed Programming - primodemus
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fstar/

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reduxredacted
Microsoft Research does some interesting stuff, though I have to take issue
with their choice of naming. One wonders if they're trying to poke at search
engines.

The "#" in C# made it painful, in the beginning, to craft a good query. Now
they're using a symbol commonly interpreted as a wildcard.

I'm not insinuating any evil intentions with the name (that's a little
ridiculous since it's an experimental language to begin with), but it's a
little odd that they'd choose something that will likely be search engine
unfriendly... again.

~~~
johnzabroski
Stick to criticizing the paper.

Then you can write a blog rant about how painful it is to refer to "the
second-order (polymorphic) lambda-calculus with bounded quantification" as
F-sub or F<sub><=</sub>

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troutwine
Does anyone have experience running the languages coming out of Microsoft
Research on Mono? I have no experience with C# or Mono, but I am interested in
having a go with F* and would appreciate any guidance someone more familiar
with the tech stack might have.

~~~
johnzabroski
Microsoft has some minimal degree of support for F# on Mono. It is not the
core focus for the F# team, but they do get to spend some time on it
currently. Give it a shot.

~~~
killerswan
Yep, F# works well, and Miguel de Icaza et al. are playing with it.

To get F# running with Mono, you'll want (at least on Linux) Mono 2.8+, and
either MonoDevelop 2.4 (for which Thomas Petricek's language plugin works) or
your own editor. I've mostly been using the stand-alone REPL and tweaking some
Vim syntax highlighting.

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pja
These MS language developers play for keeps don't they? First Spec#, now F*...

But seriously, this is good stuff. I wonder how long it's going to take for
this kind of proof-driven code to reach mainstream programmers? Decades I
imagine.

