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Comment by lou1306 | Hacker News Reader

I'll likely start diving into probabilistic formal methods in a few months and this seems like a good place to ask: How does Storm [1] compare to PRISM?

It looks like a promising alternative and the academic pedigree seems top-notch, but I would like to know more from anyone with hands-on experience with it.

[1] https://www.stormchecker.org

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Hi lou, I'm a contributor to Storm and will continue to work on it in my upcoming PhD position. The bottom line is that there are some things you can only do in PRISM and there are more things you can only do in Storm, but if you can do it in both, Storm is usually much faster (see QComp: https://qcomp.org/). PRISM has better documentation. Storm has recently recieved a grant that will help improve its user interface and applicabilty. I would like to hear from you what ideas and applications you have for using PMC! :)

since you're a Storm contributor, can you explain what exactly makes it OS-dependent?

The dependencies. It does work on Linux and Mac. On Windows, you can use the WSL.

Thank you for the reply and congratulations on the PhD position! I am still not 100% sure about the specifics but my new team focuses on cyber-physical systems and whatnot, so probabilistic modelling and analysis techniques will likely play a big part. I will definitely try pinging you and the other Storm devs when things become clearer :)

Also, I'm really glad to hear there's an interest in UX, I feel it's a weak spot of many otherwise excellent formal tools out there.

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