The Dafny compilation process translates Dafny programs into target language source code and then potentially runs the result.

The Dafny-to-Python compiler writes out the translated files of a file A.dfy to a folder A-py. The -out option can be used to choose a different output folder. The input .dfy files are translated to various .py files which are placed in the output folder along with helper files. If more than one .dfy file is listed on the command-line, then the output folder name is taken from the first file.

A multi-language program that combines Dafny and Python code “just” needs to be sure that the translated Dafny code fits in to the Python code. There are two aspects to this:

• ensuring that the names of entities in the translated Dafny code are usable from Python
• ensuring that the types are the same on both sides

The Dafny runtime library

The step of compiling or running Python files requires the Dafny runtime library for Python. That library is automatically included if dafny is doing the compilation, but not if dafny is only doing translation.

Manually executing Dafny-generated Python code

Suppose a Dafny program is contained in a .dfy file, A.dfy, which also contains the Main method. One can build the corresponding Java program (without running it) using this command:

dafny build --target:py A.dfy

The compiled program is then executed using the command PYTHONPATH=A-py python3 A-py/A.py or (cd A-py; python3 A.py)

Alternatively the build and run steps can be combined: dafny run --target:py A.dfy

If there are multiple .dfy files, general practice has the dependencies included within their client files using Dafny include directives.

Combining Python and Dafny

Combining Python and Dafny source is complicated by two things.

• To run a python program, python is invoked on the one .py file that contains the python main method. However, currently (as of v3.9.1) dafny only detects main methods in the .py files created from .dfy files.
• For dafny to call python methods in some separate .py file, the calling file must import the called file (module). There is no syntax in Dafny to insert such import statements in the .py file generated from a .dfy file.

When the main is in a .py file, proceed as in this example:

In Demo2.dfy:

module {:extern "M"} M {
  class C {
    static method p() {
      print "Hello, World\n";
    }
  }
}

In Demo2x.py

import M

def main():
    print("Hi");
    M.C.p();

main()

And then execute these commands:

dafny build --target:py Demo2.dfy
PYTHONPATH=.:Demo2-py python3 Demo2x.py

The first command translates Demo2.dfy into a .py file; by using build, all the supporting runtime library routines are included as well. The second command then uses python to execute the main() method in Demo2x.py, which imports the module M from Demo2 and calls M.C.p().

To call python from Dafny, one must edit the trnaslation of the .dfy file to add the needed imports.

Matching Dafny and Python types

The correspondence between the Dafny and Python types is shown in this table.