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Table of Contents

Online editor

The easiest way to try out F* quickly is directly in your browser by using the online F* editor that's part of the F* tutorial.

Binary releases

Every now and then we release F* binaries on GitHub. This is the easiest way to get F* quickly running on your machine, but if the release you use is old you might be missing out on new features and bug fixes. Please do not report bugs in old releases until making sure they still exist in the master branch (see Building F* from sources section below).

Testing a binary package

Test that the binary is good by expanding the archive and running the following commands. (On Windows this requires Cygwin and make)

  1. Add fstar.exe and z3 to your PATH, either permanently or temporarily, for instance by running this:

     $ export PATH=/path/to/fstar/bin:$PATH
 $ fstar.exe --version
 F* 0.9.1.1
 platform=Linux_x86_64
 compiler=OCaml 4.02.3
 date=2015-12-04T15:45:49+0100
 commit=344c7d1
 $ z3 --version
 Z3 version 4.4.1

  2. Run the unit tests:

     $ make -C examples/unit-tests

  3. If you have OCaml installed run, the following command should print "Hello F*!"

     $ make -C examples/hello ocaml

  4. If you have F# installed run, the following command should print "Hello F*!"

     $ make -C examples/hello fs

  5. You can try verifying all the examples, but keep in mind that things might fail because of timeouts if your machine is not sufficiently powerful.

     $ make -C examples

OPAM package

If the OCaml package manager is present on your platform, you can install the latest F* release and required dependencies (except for Z3) using the opam package:

    $ opam install fstar

Homebrew formula for Mac OS X

On Macs you can also build and install the latest F* release using Homebrew. This will install F* and all required dependencies (including Z3):

    $ brew install fstar

For building and installing the latest F* sources from GitHub (the master branch) instead of the latest release you can do:

    $ brew install --HEAD fstar

Building F* from sources

If you have a serious interest in F* or want to report bugs then we recommend that you build F* from the sources on GitHub (the master branch).

F* is written in a subset of F# that F* itself can also parse with a special flag. Therefore, the standard build process of F* involves the following three steps:

Step 1. build F* from sources using the F# compiler (obtaining a .NET binary for F*);

Step 2. extract the sources of F* itself to OCaml using the F* binary produced at step 1 (or even a previous step 3);

Step 3. re-build F* using the OCaml compiler from the code generated at step 2 (obtaining a faster native binary for F*).

Note: If you build F* from sources you will also need to get a Z3 binary. This is further explained towards the end of this document.

Easier alternative: If you don't care about efficiency and about the .NET dependency you can stop already after step 1.

Easier alternative: If you don't want to use F#/.NET/Mono at all you can also build F* directly from the generated OCaml sources. Therefore, for convenience, we keep a (possibly a bit outdated) snapshot of the F* sources extracted to OCaml (the result of step 2) in the repo. This allows you to skip directly to step 3 and build F* with just an OCaml compiler.

Step 1. Building F* from sources using the F# compiler

On Windows 7/8/10

Easy alternative: open a Cygwin command prompt, and run make from the src directory. This will run msbuild on the Visual Studio solution file; in effect, this performs exactly what you would get by clicking the "Build" button within Visual Studio.

Read on for the more complete solution involving Visual Studio itself.

  • Run the src/VS/nuget-restore.bat script from the top-level F* directory before opening the solution for the first time. F* depends upon NuGet packages that are incompatible with Visual Studio's internal invocation of NuGet's restore feature.

    C:\Users\xxx\Desktop\FStar>src\VS\nuget-restore.bat
Installing 'FsLexYacc.Runtime 6.1.0'.
Installing 'FsLexYacc 6.1.0'.
Successfully installed 'FsLexYacc.Runtime 6.1.0'.
Successfully installed 'FsLexYacc 6.1.0'.
All packages listed in packages.config are already installed.

  • Using Visual Studio, open src/VS/FStar.sln and build the solution (in the menus: Build > Build Solution). Make sure to choose the 'Release' configuration. Note: the 'Debug' configuration may be the default, although it has no optimizations enabled and is not capable of bootstrapping.

Note: If Visual Studio fails to open one or more projects, the problem is likely that the NuGet package cache hasn't been restored. You must either exit Visual Studio to restore the cache (using the src/VS/nuget-restore.bat script), or restart Visual Studio after having restored the cache. Otherwise, F* may not successfully build (or correctly build).

On Linux or Mac OS X using Mono

  • Install mono (any version from 4.0.3.0 to 4.4.x) and fsharp (version 4.0.1.x)

  • Depending on your distribution, you might need to manually import certificates for Mono (you don't need to do this on Arch if you use the default mono package)

      $ mozroots --import --sync

  • Compile F* from sources

      $ git clone https://github.com/FStarLang/FStar.git
  $ cd FStar
  $ make -C src

  • Try out

      $ export PATH=/path/to/fstar/bin:$PATH
  $ make -C src boot && make -C examples

  • If make boot causes a stack overflow try issuing ulimit -s unlimited in the terminal beforehand.

Note: you may want to make the PATH change permanent by adding:

export PATH=/path/to/fstar/bin:$PATH

into your ~/.bashrc.

Prerequisite for steps 2 and 3: Working OCaml setup

Steps 2 and 3 below require a working OCaml (any version from 4.02.2 to 4.03.0) setup.

Instructions for Windows

Please use the OCaml Installer for Windows. Follow the installation guide that's over there (it's optimized for F*).

Instructions for Linux and Mac OS X

  1. Install OCaml (any version from 4.02.2 to 4.03.0)
    • Can be installed using either your package manager or using OPAM (see below).

Instructions for all OSes

  1. Install OPAM (version 1.2.x).

  2. Initialize and configure OPAM

    • You need to initialize it by running opam init and update the PATH variable to the ocamlfind and the OCaml libraries. If you allow opam init to edit your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile, it is done automatically; otherwise, use: eval $(opam config env).

    • If you're on Windows see https://github.com/protz/ocaml-installer/wiki for instructions on how to configure your environment for use with OPAM

  3. F* depends on a bunch of external OCaml packages which you can install using OPAM:

$ opam install ocamlfind batteries stdint zarith yojson

Step 2. Extracting the sources of F* itself to OCaml

  1. Get an F* binary, either using the F#/.NET build process (step 1 above; remember to build a Release version, else you'll get a StackOverflowException in make ocaml -C src below), or the OCaml build process (step 3 above).

  2. Make sure you follow the instructions above to get a working OCaml setup.

  3. Once you satisfy the prerequisites for your platform, translate the F* sources from F# to OCaml using F* by running:

     $ make ocaml -C src

Step 3. Building F* from the OCaml snapshot

Once you have a working OCaml setup (see above) just run the following command:

    $ make -C src/ocaml-output

Note: On Windows this generates a native F* binary, that is, a binary that does not depend on cygwin1.dll, since the installer above uses a native Windows port of OCaml. Cygwin is just there to provide make and other utilities required for the build. This also means that when linking C libraries with OCaml compiled objects one needs to use the correct mingw libraries and not the Cygwin ones. OCaml uses special flexlink technology for this. See contrib/CoreCrypto/ml and examples/crypto for examples.

Runtime dependency: Z3 SMT solver

To use F* for verification you need a Z3 4.4.1 binary. Our binary packages include that already in bin, but if you compile F* from sources you need to get a Z3 binary yourself and add it to your PATH. We recommend you use the 4.4.1 binaries here: https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3/releases/tag/z3-4.4.1