F* (programming language)

Last updated
F*
Fstar-official-logo-2015.png
The official F* logo
Paradigm Multi-paradigm: functional, imperative
Family ML: Caml: OCaml
Designed by Nikhil Swamy, Juan Chen, Cédric Fournet, Pierre-Yves Strub, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Jean Yang
Developers Microsoft Research,
Inria [1]
First appeared2011;14 years ago (2011)
Stable release
v2025.03.25 [2] / 26 March 2025;3 months ago (2025-03-26)
Typing discipline dependent, inferred, static, strong
Implementation languageF*
OS Cross-platform: Linux, macOS, Windows
License Apache 2.0
Filename extensions .fst
Website fstar-lang.org
Influenced by
Dafny, F#, Lean, OCaml, Rocq, Standard ML

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). [1] 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.

Contents

It was introduced in 2011. [3] [4] and is under active development on GitHub. [2]

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. [5] [6]

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. [7]

References

  1. 1 2 "Microsoft Research Inria Joint Centre". MSR-INRIA.
  2. 1 2 "FStarLang/FStar". GitHub. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
  3. ↑ 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.
  4. ↑ "The F* Project". Microsoft. Retrieved 20 April 2023.
  5. ↑ "fstar.exe is no longer buildable in F# as a .NET executable #2512". Github. Retrieved 17 April 2023.
  6. ↑ "Consider dropping requirement that F* code has to be valid F# #1737". Github. Retrieved 17 April 2023.
  7. 1 2 Swamy, Nikhil; Martínez, Guido; Rastogi, Aseem (Jan 14, 2024). Proof-Oriented Programming in F* (PDF).

Sources

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