Turing.jl: RFC: Ideas for codebase cleanup

[hessammehr]

Just hoping to get the ball rolling on getting the package slimmer code- and dependency-wise.

Some low-hanging fruit:

• Move example models to a separate repository, e.g. Turing-examples.

I've also noticed that the dependency on Stan is solely for the purpose of testing/benchmarking, which wouldn't be immediately of interest to users. Two possible solutions:

• Have this code live in a separate repository, e.g. Turing-benchmarks.
• Use something like Require.jl to evaluate this code only if the Stan.jl is installed.

[willtebbutt]

+1 regarding putting examples in a separate repo. Might it make sense to create a Turing organisation to group together examples + core codebase + any other side-projects that get created in the future?

I believe the Stan dependency is also required for their NUTS implementation, but @yebai or @xukai92 know more about this than I do.

[yebai]

+1 regarding putting examples in a separate repo.

Yes, we can do that relatively quickly.
@xukai92 what do you think?

I believe the Stan dependency is also required for their NUTS implementation, but @yebai or @xukai92 know more about this than I do.

We currently use Stan.jl's sampler's configuration type in Turing. It is not a huge burden to implement a new type of NUTS configurations, we might do that in the near future.

[trappmartin]

+1 for creating a Turing github organization to group Turing related packages.

[yebai]

@hessammehr @willtebbutt @xukai92 @wesselb Following up our discussion, I have created an organisation account TuringLang. I have also transferred the Turing.jl repo to the organisation account. This might cause some issues if you have your local repo still pointing to my personal repo, but should be easy to fix.

@hessammehr could you create a PR to separate Turing examples into a separate repo?

[ChrisRackauckas]

Github auto-forwards so there shouldn't be any URL issues. But you should put in a METADATA PR to change the URL anyways.

[yebai]

@ChrisRackauckas will do that, thanks for the swift reply!

[xukai92]

Maybe we could arrange the repos in this way.

• Turing.jl
  
  
  
  • Use Require.jl for the part of code which only for the support of Stan's construction
  
  
• Turing-examples
  
  
  
  • This has dependencies on Turing.jl and Stan.jl
  
  
  • Make benchmark scripts as tests for Turing-examples repo
  
  

[hessammehr]

Example models now live here.

[yebai]

@hessammehr Many thanks for the help!

[yebai]

@xukai92 could you create a PR for the following 2 tasks you suggested, please?

Use Require.jl for the part of the code which only for the support of Stan's construction

Make benchmark scripts as tests for Turing-examples repo

[yebai]

@willtebbutt @trappmartin @wesselb @emilemathieu pls feel free to suggest any improvements that make Turing more readable and organized!

[xukai92]

@yebai I was trying to enable Travis on Turing-Examples but recevied "You don't have sufficient rights to enable this repo on Travis."

[yebai]

@yebai I was trying to enable Travis on Turing-Examples but recevied "You don't have sufficient rights to enable this repo on Travis."

@xukai92 should be working now!

[xukai92]

Thanks! I can fix the .yml then

[xukai92]

@yebai Need some more work to fix the Stan dependency. I will probably do that after the current PR I'm working on so I created an issue (https://github.com/TuringLang/Turing.jl/issues/447) for that.

[yebai]

Closed in favour of https://github.com/TuringLang/Turing.jl/issues/689