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 8.15 integrates many bug fixes, deprecations and cleanups as well as a few new features. We highlight some of the most impactful changes here:

• The apply with tactic no longer renames arguments unless compatibility flag Apply With Renaming is set.

• Improvements to the auto tactic family, fixing the Hint Unfold behavior, and generalizing the use of discrimination nets.

• The typeclasses eauto tactic has a new best_effort option allowing it to return partial solutions to a proof search problem, depending on the mode declarations associated to each constraint. This mode is used by typeclass resolution during type inference to provide more precise error messages.

• Many commands and options were deprecated or removed after deprecation and more consistently support locality attributes.

• The Import command is extended with import_categories to select the components of a module to import or not, including features such as hints, coercions, and notations.

• A visual Ltac debugger is now available in CoqIDE.

See the Changes in 8.15.0 section below for the detailed list of changes, including potentially breaking changes marked with Changed. Coq's reference manual for 8.15, documentation of the 8.15 standard library and developer documentation of the 8.15 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 41 contributors to this version are Tanaka Akira, Frédéric Besson, Juan Conejero, Ali Caglayan, Cyril Cohen, Adrian Dapprich, Maxime Dénès, Stéphane Desarzens, Christian Doczkal, Andrej Dudenhefner, Jim Fehrle, Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias, Attila Gáspár, Gaëtan Gilbert, Jason Gross, Hugo Herbelin, Jasper Hugunin, Bart Jacobs, Ralf Jung, Grant Jurgensen, Jan-Oliver Kaiser, Wojciech Karpiel, Fabian Kunze, Olivier Laurent, Yishuai Li, Erik Martin-Dorel, Guillaume Melquiond, Jean-Francois Monin, Pierre-Marie Pédrot, Rudy Peterson, Clément Pit-Claudel, Seth Poulsen, Pierre Roux, Takafumi Saikawa, Kazuhiko Sakaguchi, Michael Soegtrop, Matthieu Sozeau, Enrico Tassi, Laurent Théry, Anton Trunov and Théo Zimmerman.

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 8.15's development spanned 3 months from the release of Coq 8.14.0. Gaëtan Gilbert is the release manager of Coq 8.15. This release is the result of 384 merged PRs, closing 67 issues.