blockspacer/protostan

Thin protobuf interface wrapper for Stan

protostan

The goal of protostan is to provide an API for Stan based solely on passing (and returning) protobuf messages. The advantages of this approach are:

• As long as a language has protobuf (version 3) support, a Stan interface can be written using solely the language and its protobuf package without the need to interface with C++.
• Protobuf has impressive multi-language support, with apparent priority given to the C++ interface among others. Other languages important to Stan (e.g.-R, Python) also have solid support.
• Protobuf deals with strongly-typed data and offers well-defined mappings from those types to different language-specific types.

We would like to wrap enough of the API so that a first interface for a language could be written using protobuf without touching the C++ API. For the time being this repository should contain:

• Stan-related .proto files for other projects.
• Versions of Stan external API functions with only protobuf messages as input and output types.

Location of Protocol Buffer Message Definitions

Message definitions are found in the proto subdirectory.

Quickstart

1. This repository assumes that find_library, as written, will find gtest, protobuf, and stanc. If that's a tall order for your system, use this dev repo instead:

cd ${DEV_DIR}
git clone https://github.com/sakrejda/stan-dev.git
cd stan-dev

If you have all that available already:

cd ${DEV_DIR}
git clone https://github.com/sakrejda/protostan.git
cd protostan

2. If using the dev repo, set option to build protostan and any missing dependencies. By default this includes all the required dependencies.

...... HOW?

3. Set up a build environment and build.

With the dev repo:

cd ${BUILD_DIR}
cmake ${DEV_DIR}/stan-dev 
make

With the stand-alone:

cd ${BUILD_DIR}
cmake ${DEV_DIR}/protostan
make

4. Run tests

cd ${BUILD_DIR}
ctest

5. Installation, currently none.