ACL2 vs Boogie
ACL2
acl2.orgBoogie
github.comSide by side
| Figure | ACL2 | Boogie |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Formal Verification Tools | 7.8 (#14) | 8.1 (#7) |
| Installation | Unix-like installation instructions cover Linux, macOS with Intel or ARM processors, and FreeBSD; Windows has separate installation instructions. | Releases are packaged as a .NET global tool and can be installed with dotnet tool install --global boogie. |
| Integrations | The Community Books include interfacing tools for file I/O, operating-system access, raw Common Lisp libraries, and connections to other programs. | The repository lists VCC and HAVOC for C, and Dafny, Chalice, Spec#, and Move verifiers as projects built on Boogie. |
| Purpose | ACL2 combines a Lisp-based programming language for formal models with a reasoning engine that can prove properties about those models. | Boogie is an intermediate modeling and verification language used as a layer for building program verifiers for other languages. |
| Support | ACL2 users can get help through the acl2-help mailing list, which the site recommends to new users. | The project directs users to its GitHub issue tracker to ask questions and report issues. |
Plans
In their own words
Boogie
Boogie is a modeling language and tool for building program verifiers for other languages. It accepts Boogie language input, can optionally infer invariants, and generates verification conditions for an SMT solver. Z3 is the default solver; CVC5 and Yices2 support is experimental. The Civl extension lets users model concurrent and distributed systems. Boogie is self-hosted and distributed as a.NET global tool through NuGet. It requires.NET and a supported SMT solver, and the NuGet listing identifies version 3.5.7 as targeting.NET 8.0 or higher. The project uses the MIT License and is free at free. The repository names VCC and HAVOC for C, along with Dafny, Chalice, Spec#, and Move verifiers, as projects built on Boogie. Yices2 has a stated constraint: it works for unquantified fragments such as arrays, arithmetic, and bitvectors, but not for quantifiers, generalized arrays, or datatypes. Users can ask questions or report issues through the project issue tracker, and contributions are accepted through pull requests.