PyStan and PyCharm

#1

Hello all,

I have recently trying to use PyStan in Windows and found out it’s installation is more difficult than I thought. I normally use PyCharm as my IDE and was hopping to use PyStan with it. However, most advice I saw on the internet suggested I installed Anaconda instead, which I believe it comes with it’s onw IDE.
My question is: is it worth to learn how to work with Jupiter or Spider just for the sake of using PyStan? Should I try to find a way to incorporate both PyCharm and PyStan? Or should I try to call RStan (via subprocess for example) from python instead?

Thanks in advance!

#2

PyStan needs mingw-w64 compiler and this is usually done with conda package manager which also install needed changes for python distutils.

You could link your PyCharm to conda env, but the problem is, that it is currently a bit broken, because user needs to call activation script to enable mingw.

See discussion in https://github.com/stan-dev/pystan/issues/520

Ps. I personally recommend jupyter lab as an IDE

1 Like
#3

Alright, I installed Anaconda and following the windows instructions on the PyStan documentation to Windows and I managed to run PyStan in a conda environment.

I’m still trying to work around the problems surrounding PyCharm and PyStan as I’d really like to use PyCharm. However, I’m already trying out Juptyer Lab, thank you for the recommendation.

Thank you for your response!