Comment by seeknotfind

I studied formal languages for ~2 years and have professional experience programming coq. The real benefit of this language, over other formal languages is the focus on being able to write real programs in it. Most theorem proving languages are focused on mathematics or proving things about a program, and they are very abstract. This language appears to have a goal of bridging the gap and making it simple to write programs and prove parts of them. I believe this is the future of formal languages. If you write something in Rust, it would be great to prove aspects about it. Why not? Well F* is a vision if this future. As proof automation gets better, we will be able to prove many things about our programs, something which is not typically attempted due to difficulty. For instance, imagine proving that a certain path has no allocations, spawns no threads, cannot deadlock, preserves privacy, only modifies a certain subset of global data, is a specific algorithmic complexity, is not subject to timing attacks, maintains the conference of a cache, is memory safe (without a borrow checker). The limit is your imagination and Rice's theorem.