Jstat vs. stdlib

[quinn-dougherty]

squiggle-lang currently depends on jstat.

• 1.3e6 weekly downloads
• unit tested
• last commit april 2021.

There's an alternative to jstat in stdlib

• weekly downloads is harder to ascertain because it's broken up into a couple dozen or so @stdlib/* packages, but the stats package is 8.7e3 weekly downloads
• 93% codecov. I've been reading the repos for 15 minutes and it's hard to identify where test code actually is, but it seems they like to use tape
• last commit today

It is my assessment that the apparent dominance of jstat is that it's an older project.

It's volume of users is a good signal, we can sort of assume it's been subjected to a soft "public audit", a property that doesn't apply as well to stdlib owing to the 2 OOMs difference in weekly downloads.

[OAGr]

Good find, that looks pretty neat.

Do you think it's possible/easy to import only a small portion of it? The entire thing is much larger than Jstat

[quinn-dougherty]

It looks like lots of people just depend on and import specific subsets!

[quinn-dougherty]

You mentioned stdlib in here #330, but it feels messy to me to incrementally add in parts of it without factoring out all of the jstat. We could do it in pieces but I'd want to be on a clear epic schedule to complete the refactor. Just a hunch of mine.

[OAGr]

It doesn't seem too bad to me. I don't think refactoring to jstat will be terrible, maybe 1-2 stories. It's not a huge dependency, and I'm not worried now about a bit of bloat.

This to me is similar to the issue of using "|>" vs "->".