What is Statebox?
Statebox is developing a technological stack based on a visual programming language. It’s not a general purpose programming language but one focused on modeling and executing processes. The Statebox language is built using a functional programming approach which utilizes, amongst other things, category theory, Petri nets, open games, logic programming and cryptography.
Main properties of the Statebox language:
- Abstraction - the core of the language is a mathematically minimalistic structure aimed to facilitate reasoning about its behaviour
- Compositionality - the entire stack is designed from a category theory perspective in order to increase compositionality, which is quite different from modularity.
- Visual - use of diagrams and Petri nets for their computational and diagrammatic reasoning properties.
- Correct by Construction - end-to-end correctness proofs are a fundamental design principle, not an afterthought. According to this philosophy we prefer a restricted, always terminating language (a non Turing complete one).
The ecosystem for the language is composed of several main parts:
- Visual Editor - allows for drawing and interacting with the Statebox flavour of Petri nets as well as their analysis (reachability, deadlocks, termination etc.).
- Engine - a dependently typed core which ensures that the mathematical foundations specified in the monograph are preserved and implemented in a sound way.
- Typedefs - an intermediary language for translating types from Statebox processes into target languages. It is essentially a well structured data encoder/decoder. It’s developed by Statebox and you can find out more on github and the official website.
- AQL (Algebraic Query Language) - category theory is a foundational principle at Statebox and we want our data to be categorical as well. That’s why we’re collaborating with Categorical Informatics to bring AQL to our ecosystem.
If you are interested in learning more about our technology, you can do the following:
- Read the Statebox Primer which covers some of the core concepts used in our tech
- Join our telegram channel
- Check out the rest of the website, and focus on Talks, Research and News sections of the website
- Read our blog