squiggle/packages/squiggle-lang

Squiggle language

An estimation language

Use the npm package

For instance, in a javascript project, you can

yarn add @quri/squiggle-lang

The @quri/squiggle-lang package exports a single function, run, which given a string of Squiggle code, will execute the code and return any exports and the environment created from the squiggle code.

import { run } from "@quri/squiggle-lang";
run(
  "normal(0, 1) * fromSamples([-3,-2,-1,1,2,3,3,3,4,9]"
).value.value.toSparkline().value;

However, for most use cases you'll prefer to use our library of react components, and let your app transitively depend on @quri/squiggle-lang.

run has two optional arguments. The first optional argument allows you to set sampling settings for Squiggle when representing distributions. The second optional argument allows you to pass an environment previously created by another run call. Passing this environment will mean that all previously declared variables in the previous environment will be made available.

The return type of run is a bit complicated, and comes from auto generated js code that comes from rescript. We highly recommend using typescript when using this library to help navigate the return type.

Build for development

We assume that you ran yarn at the monorepo level.

yarn build

yarn bundle is needed for a deployment.

Other:

yarn start  # listens to files and recompiles at every mutation
yarn test

# where o := open in osx and o := xdg-open in linux,
yarn coverage:rescript; o _coverage/index.html  # produces coverage report and opens it in browser

Distributing this package or using this package from other monorepo packages

As it says in the other packages/*/README.mds, building this package is an essential step of building other packages.

Information

Squiggle is a language for representing probability distributions, as well as functions that return probability distributions. Its original intended use is for improving epistemics around EA decisions.

This package, @quri/squiggle-lang, contains the core language of squiggle. The main feature revolves around evaluating squiggle expressions. Currently the package only exports a single function, named "run", which from a squiggle string returns an object representing the result of the evaluation.

If using this package for tests or as a dependency, typescript typings are available and recommended to be used.

This package is mainly written in ReScript, but has a typescript interface.

ReScript has an interesting philosophy of not providing much in the way of effective build tools. Every ReScript file is compiled into .bs.js and .gen.ts files with the same name and same location, and then you can use these files in other .js files to create your program. To generate these files to build the package, you run yarn build.

.gen.ts files are created by the @genType decorator, which creates typescript typings for needed parts of the codebase so that they can be easily used in typescript. These .gen.ts files reference the .bs.js files generated by rescript.