Skip to content

starting.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
115 lines (80 loc) · 4.29 KB

starting.md

File metadata and controls

115 lines (80 loc) · 4.29 KB
Raw
title Getting Started
layout page
nav_order 2

Getting Started

Thank you for your interest in Formulog! This page describes how to set up Formulog and provides some pointers on writing Formulog programs.

Setting up Formulog

There are three main ways to set up Formulog (listed in increasing order of number of dependencies):

  • Using the Docker image
  • Downloading the JAR
  • Building from source

Use the Docker image

Prebuilt images are available on Docker Hub. If you have Docker installed, you can spin up an Ubuntu container with Formulog, our custom version of Soufflé, and some example programs by running this command (replace X.Y.Z with the latest version):

docker run -it aaronbembenek/formulog:X.Y.Z # may require sudo

This should place you in the directory /root/formulog/, with a file formulog.jar and some example Formulog programs in the examples/ directory.

Download the JAR

Dependencies:

  • JRE 11+
  • Z3 (v4.12.2 is known to work; other recent versions should work too)

You can find a prepackaged JAR file in the Releases section of the GitHub repository.

Build from Source

Dependencies:

  • JDK 11+
  • Maven (v3.9.5 is known to work)
  • Z3 (v4.12.2 is known to work; other recent versions should work too)

To build an executable JAR, run the command mvn package from the project source directory. This will create an executable JAR with a name like formulog-X.Y.Z-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar in the target/ directory.

If mvn package fails during testing, it might mean that there is a problem connecting with Z3. You can compile without testing by adding the -DskipTests flag.

Test Your Setup

If you have set up Formulog, you should now have an executable JAR at your fingertips. The JAR expects a single Formulog file as an argument. Let's test it on the following Formulog program (available in the Docker image and the base repository directory as examples/greeting.flg):

@edb rel entity(string)
entity("Alice").
entity("Bob").
entity("World").

rel greeting(string)
greeting(Y) :-
  entity(X),
  some(M) = get_model([`#y[string] #= str_concat("Hello, ", X)`], none),
  some(Y) = query_model(#y[string], M).

Run the following command (where formulog.jar is replaced with the name of the executable JAR):

java -jar formulog.jar examples/greeting.flg --dump-idb

You should get results like these, indicating that three greeting facts have been derived:

Parsing...
Finished parsing (0.202s)
Type checking...
Finished type checking (0.024s)
Rewriting and validating...
Finished rewriting and validating (0.253s)
Evaluating...
Finished evaluating (0.354s)

==================== SELECTED IDB RELATIONS ====================

---------- greeting (3) ----------
greeting("Hello, Alice")
greeting("Hello, Bob")
greeting("Hello, World")

Writing Formulog Programs

Now that you have Formulog set up, the fun part starts: writing Formulog programs!

Check out our [tutorial]({{ site.base_url }}{% link tutorial/index.md %}) for a walk-through of how to encode a refinement type system in Formulog. Additional short-ish example programs can be found in the examples/ directory (in the Docker image or repository base directory). For examples of larger developments, see the case studies we have used in publications:

See the [language reference]({{ site.base_url }}{% link lang_ref/index.md %}) for details about Formulog constructs.

Syntax highlighting is available for Visual Studio Code (follow instructions here) and Vim (install misc/flg.vim).

Finally, please raise a GitHub issue if you want to try out Formulog but would like additional information or assistance---we're happy to help! :)