Miking Jupyter

The goals of the Miking Jupyter project are to:

• Integrate Miking with the Jupyter environment by providing a Miking kernel for Jupyter.

• Provide seamless integration with Python from Miking languages, meaning that Miking functions can call Python code and the reverse.

• Support syntax highlighting and code editor customization for arbitrary DSLs designed in Miking.

• Support visualization within Jupyter notebooks.

MCore Jupyter Kernel

This repository contains a fully featured Jupyter kernel for MCore which is based on the mi bootstrap interpreter. It is focused on enabling a large amount of interoperability between MCore and Python.

Repository structure

This section describes where to find the main source files of the repository and their purpose.

• The actual kernel implementation can be found in kernel.ml.
• mpl_backend.py contains a matplotlib backend for displaying plots produced by matplotlib inline in Jupyter Notebooks.
• mcore-syntax/main.js contains a Notebook extension for MCore syntax highlighting.
• The project is built and installed using the make.sh script.

Jupyter basics

Jupyter provides an ecosystem for writing, documenting and visualizing code in an interactive way. The Jupyter Notebook is a literate programming environment for this purpose. Notebooks can contain text, executable code, display images and more. Notebooks provide support for many languages by using language-specific kernels, which take care of executing the user's code and producing output for the notebook to display.

To get a quick introduction on how to use Jupyter Notebooks in general, check out this tutorial. https://jupyter.org/ also provides more helpful links and information.

This README will explain how to get started with Jupyter Notebooks for MCore, and go through all the functionality of the Jupyter MCore kernel. Once you have installed the kernel in the next section, there is also an interactive notebook demonstrating MCore and the kernel's capabilities at MCoreJupyter.ipynb.

Getting started

Before using the Jupyter kernel you need to install some dependencies. The Jupyter kernel requires the Miking bootstrap interpreter, and the pyml Python bindings for OCaml.

First, install pyml to make sure boot is built with Python support:

opam install pyml

For more details and troubleshooting when installing pyml, see the main repository's README.md. Then, install the boot package. This can be done using opam with the following:

opam pin add boot https://github.com/miking-lang/miking.git#develop
opam install boot

Next, you will need to have Jupyter itself installed. To install Jupyter using pip, run the following command:

pip install jupyter

Finally, the OCaml package jupyter-kernel is needed. This package depends on the zeromq C library, so make sure to install it on your system first. On Debian-based Linux distributions, this can be done with:

sudo apt-get install libzmq3-dev

On macOS, it can be installed using brew:

brew install zeromq

Once this is done, jupyter-kernel can be installed through opam, using:

opam install jupyter-kernel

Finally, to install the Jupyter kernel, use the make.sh script (note that you may have to run chmod +x make.sh the first time to make the script executable):

./make.sh install

You are now ready to start using the kernel. For example, to start a new Jupyter Notebook using the MCore kernel, run jupyter notebook and select the MCore kernel when creating a new notebook.

Note that $HOME/.local/bin must be included in your PATH. This should be done by default on most Linux distributions.

Functionality

This section describes all functionality that is supported by the MCore Jupyter kernel.

Basic code cells

The Jupyter kernel allows writing and executing code in an interactive manner. For example, to print the typical 'Hello world!' message, try inputting the following into a cell and executing it using Shift-Enter.

print "Hello world!"

The notebook provides syntax highlighting and autocompletion. To trigger the autocompletion, press Tab after inputting part of a word. The completions include both builtin functions and user-defined names.

Now you're playing with Python

The MCore kernel also allows executing Python code and interacting with it from MCore. Use the special directive %%python at the top of a cell to evaluate Python code.

For example, the following cell defines a Python function foo and calls it.

%%python
def foo(x):
  print("foo"+x)

foo("bar")

Running the cell will print foobar, as one might expect.

You can call the functions you have defined in Python cells in normal MCore cells by using the Python intrinsics (for more information on these, see README.md or the example notebook). A user-defined function can be called by importing and using the Python module __main__. For example, consider the following cell:

let m = pyimport "__main__" in
let x = "bar" in
pycall m "foo" (x,)

This cell will call the Python function foo defined above, again printing foobar as expected.

Plotting graphs

It is possible to plot graphs using the Python library matplotlib. The Jupyter kernel offers integration with matplotlib to display plots directly in a notebook.

To use this functionality, first make sure that matplotlib is installed (if not, you can install it using pip). Now, when you use matplotlib's plot functions in a notebook cell, the plots will be displayed as part of the cell's output. For example, you can try running the following in a cell:

let plt = pyimport "matplotlib.pyplot"
let x = [1,2,4,8]
let _ = pycall plt "plot" (x,)

While this example uses the Python intrinsics, running the plot code directly in a Python cell would of course also work.

IPM visualization

It is also possible to display visualizations of programmatic models from The Miking Interactive Programmatic Modeling (IPM) Environment.

Start by following the installation instructions at https://github.com/miking-lang/miking-ipm to install the IPM visualization server. Make sure that the ipm-server executable is available in PATH and that you are able to run it from the command line.

To visualize a model, use the %%visualize directive. The visualization server will be started in the background the first time the directive is used.

Use %%visualize in a cell whose output is a string representation of the relevant model; the IPM repo provides the function formatModels for this purpose. For instance, supposing model is a predefined DFA model and that the IPM visualization functions have been imported, running the following code in a cell would produce a visualization of the DFA:

%%visualize
formatModels [model]

For a more complete example, see the example interactive notebook.

Interactive notebook

If you followed the installation instructions above, you can try out the interactive example notebook, by running jupyter notebook in the root directory of the repository and opening the file MCoreJupyter.ipynb from the Jupyter Notebook interface. The notebook features many examples, including MCore basics and the Python intrinsics, demonstrating the full capabilities of the MCore Jupyter kernel.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2020 David Broman

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.