Debugging

Interactive visualizations are a primary tool for understanding Squiggle code, but there are some additional techniques that can improve the debugging process. Here are some tips and tricks:

Basic Console Logging

• Built-in Inspection: Utilize the inspect() function to log any variable to the console. This function provides a detailed view of the variable's current state and is useful for tracking values throughout your code.
• Variable Settings Toggle: Click on the variable menu in the Squiggle interface and select "Log to JS Console".

Window.squiggleOutput

Squiggle pushes its output to window.squiggleOutput. Like with the outputs of inspect, you can see this in the JS developer console.

Danger.json

You can call Danger.json() see variables in a format similar to JSON. This is useful for seeing all aspects of complex types like distributions.

Profiling

In the playground configuration panel, you can enable the "Performance Profiler" checkbox. This will highlight the code in the editor according to how much time was spend on each expression.

Caveats:

• The code will execute slightly slower in profiler mode
• Imports won't be profiled correctly (but slow calls of imported functions will be highlighted)
• If the code is fast, you'll randomly get highlighted and unhighlighted results, because time measurement is imprecise

If you're using Squiggle components in React, you can enable the profiler for any component that supports the environment prop with environment={profile: true}: