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Comment by markusde | Hacker News Reader

Do you think you might be able to elaborate a little bit more about this?

I was skimming the "Proof-Oriented Programming" book, and it seems that the primary way to execute F* programs is by extraction or trusted compilation (same as Rocq and Lean, for example). Does F* have some special way to work directly with realistic source code that these other systems don't?

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F* is a programming language with proof support. Lean/Coq are theorem providers that can be used to model and generate code. In Coq, there's not a standard way to generate code, you might model and create code many different ways. F* seems to bring this in as the central goal of the language. So I'm discussing this structural difference. F* has an SMT solver, but Lean can import an SMT solver. So the goal is the important difference here - making theorem proving as accessible as possible in a real language. It's a move in the right direction, but we want to get to the point standard program languages have this support if you need it.

> F* is a programming language with proof support. Lean/Coq are theorem providers that can be used to model and generate code.

Lean is also a programming language with proof support. It is very much in the same category as F* in this regard, and not in the same category as Coq (Rocq).

In Rocq/Coq, you have "extraction", which is the standard way to compile programs. This is how the C compiler CompCert is executed, for example. So, all of these languages are in the same category in this respect.

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