About

demes-c is a C library for parsing Demes demographic models using libyaml.

Installation

Clone the repository and type make.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/grahamgower/demes-c.git
cd demes-c
make

You may need to first install libyaml and/or edit the Makefile to provide its location. This will build a static library libdemes.a and a resolver binary that can resolve Demes YAML files.

API

See demes.h and resolver.c to understand the interface.

Gotchas

• metadata is accepted in input files but not available in the API (issue #13)
• errors are printed to stderr instead of being returned via the API (issue #18).

Test suite

The demes-c tests rely on the demes-spec git submodule. If you didn't clone the repository with --recurse-submodules then you can get the submodule with

git submodule init
git submodule update

There are three test-related targets in the toplevel Makefile, which are called during the continuous integration github action that gets run when a pull request is opened.

• make test checks that all valid test cases in the demes-spec repo can be loaded and that all invalid test cases are correctly rejected.
• make memcheck runs the resolver under valgrind to check for memory errors. All error paths are checked by mocking various libc and libyaml functions to simulate failures. This can take a few minutes to run.
• make pytest compares the output of the C resolver to the output of the reference implementation in the demes-spec repo. This needs Python >= 3.10 with the packages listed in tests/requirements.txt.