The Coq Proof Assistant

Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs. Typical applications include the certification of properties of programming languages (e.g. the CompCert compiler certification project, the Verified Software Toolchain for verification of C programs, or the Iris framework for concurrent separation logic), the formalization of mathematics (e.g. the full formalization of the Feit-Thompson theorem, or homotopy type theory), and teaching.

Coq version 8.14 integrates many usability improvements, as well as an important change in the core language. The main changes include:

• The internal representation of match has changed to a more space-efficient and cleaner structure, allowing the fix of a completeness issue with cumulative inductive types in the type-checker. The internal representation is now closer to the user-level view of match, where the argument context of branches and the inductive binders in and as do not carry type annotations.

• A new coqnative binary performs separate native compilation of libraries, starting from a .vo file. It is supported by coq_makefile.

• Improvements to typeclasses and canonical structure resolution, allowing more terms to be considered as classes or keys.

• More control over notations declarations and support for primitive types in string and number notations.

• Removal of deprecated tactics, notably omega, which has been replaced by a greatly improved lia, along with many bug fixes.

• New Ltac2 APIs for interaction with Ltac1, manipulation of inductive types and printing.

• Many changes and additions to the standard library in the numbers, vectors and lists libraries. A new signed primitive integers library Sint63 is available in addition to the unsigned Uint63 library.

See the Changes in 8.14.0 section below for the detailed list of changes, including potentially breaking changes marked with Changed. Coq's reference manual, documentation of the standard library and developer documentation of the ML API are also available.

Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias, Gaëtan Gilbert, Michael Soegtrop and Théo Zimmermann worked on maintaining and improving the continuous integration system and package building infrastructure.

Erik Martin-Dorel has maintained the Coq Docker images that are used in many Coq projects for continuous integration.

The OPAM repository for Coq packages has been maintained by Guillaume Claret, Karl Palmskog, Matthieu Sozeau and Enrico Tassi with contributions from many users. A list of packages is available at https://coq.inria.fr/opam/www/.

The Coq Platform has been maintained by Michael Soegtrop and Enrico Tassi.

Our current maintainers are Yves Bertot, Frédéric Besson, Ali Caglayan, Tej Chajed, Cyril Cohen, Pierre Corbineau, Pierre Courtieu, Maxime Dénès, Jim Fehrle, Julien Forest, Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias, Gaëtan Gilbert, Georges Gonthier, Benjamin Grégoire, Jason Gross, Hugo Herbelin, Vincent Laporte, Olivier Laurent, Assia Mahboubi, Kenji Maillard, Guillaume Melquiond, Pierre-Marie Pédrot, Clément Pit-Claudel, Pierre Roux, Kazuhiko Sakaguchi, Vincent Semeria, Michael Soegtrop, Arnaud Spiwack, Matthieu Sozeau, Enrico Tassi, Laurent Théry, Anton Trunov, Li-yao Xia and Théo Zimmermann. See the Coq Team face book page for more details.

The 54 contributors to this version are Reynald Affeldt, Arthur Azevedo de Amorim, Yves Bertot, Frédéric Besson, Lasse Blaauwbroek, Ana Borges, Ali Caglayan, Cyril Cohen, Columbus240, Pierre Courtieu, Maxime Dénès, Andrej Dudenhefner, Jim Fehrle, Yannick Forster, Simon Friis Vindum, Gaëtan Gilbert, Jason Gross, Samuel Gruetter, Stefan Haan, Hugo Herbelin, Jasper Hugunin, Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Ralf Jung, Jan-Oliver Kaiser, Fabian Kunze, Vincent Laporte, Olivier Laurent, Yishuai Li, Barry M. Trager, Kenji Maillard, Erik Martin-Dorel, Guillaume Melquiond, Isaac Oscar Gariano, Pierre-Marie Pédrot, Rudy Peterson, Clément Pit-Claudel, Pierre Roux, Takafumi Saikawa, Kazuhiko Sakaguchi, Gabriel Scherer, Vincent Semeria, shenlebantongying, Avi Shinnar, slrnsc, Michael Soegtrop, Matthieu Sozeau, Enrico Tassi, Hendrik Tews, Anton Trunov, Karolin Varner, Li-yao Xia, Beta Ziliani and Théo Zimmermann.

The Coq community at large helped improve the design of this new version via the GitHub issue and pull request system, the Coq development mailing list coqdev@inria.fr, the coq-club@inria.fr mailing list, the Discourse forum and the Coq Zulip chat.

Version 8.14's development spanned 9 months from the release of Coq 8.13.0. Guillaume Melquiond is the release manager of Coq 8.14. This release is the result of 522 merged PRs, closing ~150 issues.