stanc3 Developer Documentation

Getting Started

See the Getting Started page for information on setting up a stanc3 development environment.

Resources

Here are some resources (internal and external) which may be useful to a new developer.

• Real World OCaml, a free introduction to the OCaml language which features some of the libraries we use.

• An overview of some elements of Stanc which may be strange to existing OCaml developers.

• Wiki on using Format/Fmt module

• Page on modifying the parser's error messages

• Page on exposing a new function of the Stan Math library

• Page on how we implement C++ code generation with a structured type and mini-DSL

• Wiki on generic software best practices

Getting Involved

• Here are some good issues to tackle - make sure to comment on them first to see if they are still relevant.
• We also always appreciated more documentation - either this documentation, which uses odoc, or the Stan user-facing documentation at stan-dev/docs.

Modules

The major code sections of the compiler are as follows (these are links):

• Driver
• Frontend
• Middle
• Common
• Analysis_and_optimization
• Stan_math_signatures This module stores a table of all signatures from the Stan math C++ library which are exposed to Stan, and some helper functions for dealing with those signatures.
• Stan_math_backend

These are related in the following architecture diagram

We additionally use several outside dependencies.