Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/dmbaturin/ocaml-tsort

Easy to use and user-friendly topological sort module for OCaml
https://github.com/dmbaturin/ocaml-tsort

graph ocaml ocaml-library topological-order topological-sort

Last synced: about 2 months ago
JSON representation

Easy to use and user-friendly topological sort module for OCaml

Awesome Lists containing this project

README

        

ocaml-tsort [![CircleCI badge](https://circleci.com/gh/dmbaturin/ocaml-tsort.svg?style=svg)](https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/dmbaturin/ocaml-tsort)
===========

ocaml-tsort is a library for sorting graphs in topological order. Its UI/UX is inspired by the classic UNIX `tsort(1)`.

* Uses Kahn's algorithm.
* Easy to use, but not very fast.
* Provides friendly error reporting (e.g., if there's a cycle, tells you what the offending nodes are).

The input type is (`('a * 'a list) list`). Essentially, a list of "tasks" mapped to lists of their dependencies.

# Sorting DAGs

Most of the time cyclic dependencies are bad. The main function, `Tsort.sort` returns value of this type:

```
type 'a sort_result =
Sorted of 'a list
| ErrorCycle of 'a list
```

The function is:

```
val sort : ('a * 'a list) list -> 'a sort_result
```

Examples:

```
# Tsort.sort [
("foundation", []);
("walls", ["foundation"]);
("roof", ["walls"])
] ;;
- : string Tsort.sort_result = Tsort.Sorted ["foundation"; "walls"; "roof"]

# Tsort.sort [
("foundation", ["building permit"]);
("walls", ["foundation"]);
("roof", ["walls"])
] ;;
- : string Tsort.sort_result =
Tsort.Sorted ["building permit"; "foundation"; "walls"; "roof"]

# Tsort.sort [
("foundation", ["roof"]);
("walls", ["foundation"]);
("roof", ["walls"])
] ;;
- : string Tsort.sort_result = Tsort.ErrorCycle ["roof"; "foundation"; "walls"]
```

As you can see from the second example, if there's a dependency on a node that doesn't exist in the input,
it's automatically inserted, and assumed to have no dependencies.

# Detecting non-existent dependencies

If your graph comes directly from user input, there's a good chance that dependency on a non-existent node
is a user error.

To prevent it, use `Tsort.find_nonexistent_nodes`. Example:

```
# Tsort.find_nonexistent_nodes [
("foundation", ["building permit"]);
("walls", ["foundation"]);
("roof", ["walls"])] ;;
- : (string * string list) list = [("foundation", ["building permit"])]
```

# Sorting graphs with cycles

Sometimes cycles are fine. In this case you can use `Tsort.sort_strongly_connected_components` to split
your graph into strongly connected components and sort its condensation.

Contrived example: suppose you want to line up the [Addams family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Addams_Family)
so that children come after parents, but spouse and sibling pairs are not separated.

```
Tsort.sort_strongly_connected_components [
"Morticia", ["Gomez"; "Grandmama"];
"Gomez", ["Morticia"; "Grandmama"];
"Wednesday", ["Morticia"; "Gomez"; "Pugsley"];
"Pugsley", ["Morticia"; "Gomez"; "Wednesday"];
"Grandmama", [];
"Fester", []
]
;;

- : string list list =
[["Fester"]; ["Grandmama"]; ["Morticia"; "Gomez"]; ["Wednesday"; "Pugsley"]]

```

There's also `Tsort.find_strongly_connected_components` if you just want to find what them.
For the data above, it would return `[["Morticia"; "Gomez"]; ["Wednesday"; "Pugsley"]; ["Grandmama"]; ["Fester"]]`.

# Contributing

To run our complete test suite, run `make test-complete` (requires docker).