The Dafny Integrated Development Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces an enhanced IDE for Dafny that improves user experience by providing real-time verification feedback and better failure explanations, making formal verification more accessible and efficient.

Contribution

It presents new IDE features for Dafny that enable live verification feedback and improved failure diagnostics, addressing responsiveness and usability issues.

Findings

Supports verification feedback as the user types

Provides more helpful information on verification failures

Improves responsiveness of the verification process

Abstract

In recent years, program verifiers and interactive theorem provers have become more powerful and more suitable for verifying large programs or proofs. This has demonstrated the need for improving the user experience of these tools to increase productivity and to make them more accessible to non-experts. This paper presents an integrated development environment for Dafny-a programming language, verifier, and proof assistant-that addresses issues present in most state-of-the-art verifiers: low responsiveness and lack of support for understanding non-obvious verification failures. The paper demonstrates several new features that move the state-of-the-art closer towards a verification environment that can provide verification feedback as the user types and can present more helpful information about the program or failed verifications in a demand-driven and unobtrusive way.