New OCaml Stan compiler (stanc3) meetings Monday and Wednesday at 10am

Meetings
1

Time: Monday and Wednesday at 10am
Place: http://appear.in/talts
Topic: A biweekly standup-style meeting where we talk about work we’ve done and what we’re having issues with while developing on stanc3.

3 Likes
2

I think we’ve sputtered out as stanc3 is pretty much ready for release into the wild. Let’s put a hold on these meetings until we have something concrete to talk about. @Matthijs @enetsee @rybern

That said don’t be a stranger! I’m always happy to hop on a hangout to talk something through.

3 Likes
3

Great work. Two questions.

  1. Milestone still lists several open issues. Will they be resolved before release? What’s the time table for these issues.
  2. Will the release be with compatible cmdstan, as we’ve established?
4

how much testing has been done on the error messages?
it would be nice to put together an set of models with common user mistakes
in order to assess how good the new error messages are, e.g.:

  1. encoding errors due to mangled cut-and-paste
  2. missing punctuation
  3. typos - variable names spelled wrong and misspelling doesn’t match anything in the model
  4. typos - confusion or typo where one variable is used when another is intended
  5. type error confusion - failure to declare a variable with the correct type then using it later, e.g. declare scalar, use it like vector/array, etc.
  6. failure to use higher order functions correctly

I know that the new compiler does a much better job of error detection and error reporting, but it would be nice to get user input on the error messages themselves.

5

I believe these are all pretty exhaustively shown in the bad tests @Matthijs put together : https://github.com/stan-dev/stanc3/tree/master/test/integration/bad

Not sure what you mean by this - it’s currently on develop in CmdStan and fully compatible in every way I can think of.

Those should all get fixed before release I think. None of them are major. I am personally quite busy over the next week or two but will have more free time after that.

6

Thanks. Do we have a schedule for the release?

7

https://github.com/stan-dev/stanc3/issues/14 was fixed with the missing signatures PRs I think. Not sure that there is anything else that needs to be moved from stan2.

https://github.com/stan-dev/stanc3/issues/307 and https://github.com/stan-dev/stanc3/issues/335 are being addressed by PRs from @nhuurre so those are probably close to being squashed.

So the only issue that is not really close to being fixed is the manual one. Not sure what is the status there.