The Coq Proof Assistant

The first release candidate of Coq 8.6 is available for testing. Coq 8.6 includes:

• A new, faster state-of-the-art universe constraint checker by Jacques-Henri Jourdan.
• In CoqIDE and other asynchronous interfaces, more fine-grained asynchronous processing and error reporting by Enrico Tassi, making Coq capable of recovering from errors and continuing to process the document.
• Better access to the proof engine features from Ltac: goal management primitives, range selectors and a typeclasses eauto engine handling multiple goals and multiple successes, by Cyprien Mangin, Matthieu Sozeau and Arnaud Spiwack.
• Tactic behavior uniformization and specification, generalization of intro-patterns by Hugo Herbelin and others.
• A brand new warning system allowing to control warnings, turn them into errors or ignore them selectively by Maxime Dénès, Guillaume Melquiond, Pierre-Marie Pédrot and others.
• Irrefutable patterns in abstractions, by Daniel de Rauglaudre.
• The ssreflect subterm selection algorithm by Georges Gonthier and Enrico Tassi, now accessible to tactic writers through the ssrmatching plugin.
• LtacProf, a profiler for Ltac by Jason Gross, Paul Steckler, Enrico Tassi and Tobias Tebbi.

More information can be found in the CHANGES file. Feedback and bug reports are extremely welcome.

Coq 8.6 initiates a time-based release cycle, with a major version being released every 10 months. The roadmap is also made public.

To date, Coq 8.6 contains more external contributions than any previous Coq version. Code reviews were systematically done before integration of new features, with an important focus given to compatibility and performance issues.