[REVIEW]: wrenfold: Symbolic code generation for robotics

[editorialbot]

Submitting author: @gareth-cross (Gareth Cross)
Repository: https://github.com/wrenfold/wrenfold
Branch with paper.md (empty if default branch): gareth/joss
Version: v0.0.7
Editor: @boisgera
Reviewers: @ushu, @abougouffa
Archive: Pending

Status

Status badge code:

HTML: <a href="https://joss.theoj.org/papers/783b80991d243d90e0346e2ddf9f1483"><img src="https://joss.theoj.org/papers/783b80991d243d90e0346e2ddf9f1483/status.svg"></a>
Markdown: [![status](https://joss.theoj.org/papers/783b80991d243d90e0346e2ddf9f1483/status.svg)](https://joss.theoj.org/papers/783b80991d243d90e0346e2ddf9f1483)

Reviewers and authors:

Please avoid lengthy details of difficulties in the review thread. Instead, please create a new issue in the target repository and link to those issues (especially acceptance-blockers) by leaving comments in the review thread below. (For completists: if the target issue tracker is also on GitHub, linking the review thread in the issue or vice versa will create corresponding breadcrumb trails in the link target.)

Reviewer instructions & questions

@ushu & @abougouffa, your review will be checklist based. Each of you will have a separate checklist that you should update when carrying out your review.
First of all you need to run this command in a separate comment to create the checklist:

@editorialbot generate my checklist

The reviewer guidelines are available here: https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reviewer_guidelines.html. Any questions/concerns please let @boisgera know.

✨ Please start on your review when you are able, and be sure to complete your review in the next six weeks, at the very latest ✨

Checklists

📝 Checklist for @abougouffa

📝 Checklist for @ushu

[editorialbot]

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For example, to regenerate the paper pdf after making changes in the paper's md or bib files, type:

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[editorialbot]

Software report:

github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.90  T=0.18 s (2060.3 files/s, 289221.2 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C++                            104           3290           2160          17824
C/C++ Header                   110           2716           2577          10053
Python                          36            994           1078           3118
Rust                            19            296            320           2495
CMake                           23            118            111            941
reStructuredText                30            618           1074            575
YAML                            11             70             16            405
Markdown                         9             86              0            289
TOML                            11             35              6            208
TeX                              1              7              0             69
DOS Batch                        2             10              1             35
HTML                             8              0              0             16
JSON                             1              0              0             12
make                             1              4              7              9
Bourne Shell                     1              2              3              7
SVG                              1              0              1              3
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                           368           8246           7354          36059
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Commit count by author:

   227	Gareth
    26	gareth-cross
     1	Himel Mondal

[editorialbot]

Reference check summary (note 'MISSING' DOIs are suggestions that need verification):

✅ OK DOIs

- 10.15607/RSS.2022.XVIII.041 is OK
- 10.5281/zenodo.5794541 is OK

🟡 SKIP DOIs

- No DOI given, and none found for title: Ceres Solver
- No DOI given, and none found for title: State estimation for Robotics
- No DOI given, and none found for title: Modern Robotics: Mechanics, planning, and Control
- No DOI given, and none found for title: SymEngine
- No DOI given, and none found for title: Open-sourcing SymForce

❌ MISSING DOIs

- 10.1109/iros.2017.8202230 may be a valid DOI for title: FROST: Fast Robot Optimization and Simulation Tool...

❌ INVALID DOIs

- None

[editorialbot]

Paper file info:

📄 Wordcount for paper.md is 1192

✅ The paper includes a Statement of need section

[editorialbot]

License info:

✅ License found: MIT License (Valid open source OSI approved license)

[editorialbot]

👉📄 Download article proof 📄 View article proof on GitHub 📄 👈

[abougouffa]

Review checklist for @abougouffa

Conflict of interest

• I confirm that I have read the JOSS conflict of interest (COI) policy and that: I have no COIs with reviewing this work or that any perceived COIs have been waived by JOSS for the purpose of this review.

Code of Conduct

• I confirm that I read and will adhere to the JOSS code of conduct.

General checks

• Repository: Is the source code for this software available at the https://github.com/wrenfold/wrenfold?
• License: Does the repository contain a plain-text LICENSE or COPYING file with the contents of an OSI approved software license?
• Contribution and authorship: Has the submitting author (@gareth-cross) made major contributions to the software? Does the full list of paper authors seem appropriate and complete?
• Substantial scholarly effort: Does this submission meet the scope eligibility described in the JOSS guidelines
• Data sharing: If the paper contains original data, data are accessible to the reviewers. If the paper contains no original data, please check this item.
• Reproducibility: If the paper contains original results, results are entirely reproducible by reviewers. If the paper contains no original results, please check this item.
• Human and animal research: If the paper contains original data research on humans subjects or animals, does it comply with JOSS's human participants research policy and/or animal research policy? If the paper contains no such data, please check this item.

Functionality

• Installation: Does installation proceed as outlined in the documentation?
• Functionality: Have the functional claims of the software been confirmed?
• Performance: If there are any performance claims of the software, have they been confirmed? (If there are no claims, please check off this item.)

Documentation

• A statement of need: Do the authors clearly state what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?
• Installation instructions: Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies? Ideally these should be handled with an automated package management solution.
• Example usage: Do the authors include examples of how to use the software (ideally to solve real-world analysis problems).
• Functionality documentation: Is the core functionality of the software documented to a satisfactory level (e.g., API method documentation)?
• Automated tests: Are there automated tests or manual steps described so that the functionality of the software can be verified?
• Community guidelines: Are there clear guidelines for third parties wishing to 1) Contribute to the software 2) Report issues or problems with the software 3) Seek support

Software paper

• Summary: Has a clear description of the high-level functionality and purpose of the software for a diverse, non-specialist audience been provided?
• A statement of need: Does the paper have a section titled 'Statement of need' that clearly states what problems the software is designed to solve, who the target audience is, and its relation to other work?
• State of the field: Do the authors describe how this software compares to other commonly-used packages?
• Quality of writing: Is the paper well written (i.e., it does not require editing for structure, language, or writing quality)?
• References: Is the list of references complete, and is everything cited appropriately that should be cited (e.g., papers, datasets, software)? Do references in the text use the proper citation syntax?

[gareth-cross]

Hi @abougouffa thank you for your review. It looks like the checklist is complete. Are there any other steps I should take @boisgera ?

[abougouffa]

Hello @gareth-cross,

Hi @abougouffa thank you for your review.

You're welcome,

It looks like the checklist is complete.

Yep, I've completed the checklist. Sorry, I forgot to add a final comment. Anyway, I didn't find anything extra to mention. The paper is clear and follows the journal guidelines. And the repo is well organized, easy to install and use. I followed some examples provided in the repo, and I was able to reproduce the results.

I would like to felicitate you for this work. I will certainly use your library if I need to prototype or implement an algorithm with complex math expressions.

Thanks again!

A.B.

[boisgera]

Hi @abougouffa thank you for your review. It looks like the checklist is complete. Are there any other steps I should take @boisgera ?

Let me ping the 2nd reviewer (@ushu). I know he has been working on the review of your project, but AFAICT he has not yet created his checklist. Sorry for not being more reactive, I should have seen that @abougouffa had completed his checklist a while ago (unfortunately I don't get automatically notified when a reviewer checks a box).

[ushu]

Review checklist for @ushu

Conflict of interest

• I confirm that I have read the JOSS conflict of interest (COI) policy and that: I have no COIs with reviewing this work or that any perceived COIs have been waived by JOSS for the purpose of this review.

Code of Conduct

• I confirm that I read and will adhere to the JOSS code of conduct.

General checks

• Repository: Is the source code for this software available at the https://github.com/wrenfold/wrenfold?
• License: Does the repository contain a plain-text LICENSE or COPYING file with the contents of an OSI approved software license?
• Contribution and authorship: Has the submitting author (@gareth-cross) made major contributions to the software? Does the full list of paper authors seem appropriate and complete?
• Substantial scholarly effort: Does this submission meet the scope eligibility described in the JOSS guidelines
• Data sharing: If the paper contains original data, data are accessible to the reviewers. If the paper contains no original data, please check this item.
• Reproducibility: If the paper contains original results, results are entirely reproducible by reviewers. If the paper contains no original results, please check this item.
• Human and animal research: If the paper contains original data research on humans subjects or animals, does it comply with JOSS's human participants research policy and/or animal research policy? If the paper contains no such data, please check this item.

Functionality

• Installation: Does installation proceed as outlined in the documentation?
• Functionality: Have the functional claims of the software been confirmed?
• Performance: If there are any performance claims of the software, have they been confirmed? (If there are no claims, please check off this item.)

Documentation

• A statement of need: Do the authors clearly state what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?
• Installation instructions: Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies? Ideally these should be handled with an automated package management solution.
• Example usage: Do the authors include examples of how to use the software (ideally to solve real-world analysis problems).
• Functionality documentation: Is the core functionality of the software documented to a satisfactory level (e.g., API method documentation)?
• Automated tests: Are there automated tests or manual steps described so that the functionality of the software can be verified?
• Community guidelines: Are there clear guidelines for third parties wishing to 1. Contribute to the software 2. Report issues or problems with the software 3. Seek support

Software paper

• Summary: Has a clear description of the high-level functionality and purpose of the software for a diverse, non-specialist audience been provided?
• A statement of need: Does the paper have a section titled 'Statement of need' that clearly states what problems the software is designed to solve, who the target audience is, and its relation to other work?
• State of the field: Do the authors describe how this software compares to other commonly-used packages?
• Quality of writing: Is the paper well written (i.e., it does not require editing for structure, language, or writing quality)?
• References: Is the list of references complete, and is everything cited appropriately that should be cited (e.g., papers, datasets, software)? Do references in the text use the proper citation syntax?

[ushu]

Hey there 👋

Sorry for the late start, but I'm proceeding with the review right now.
I'm currently playing with the lib while reviewing the paper.

@boisgera am I supposed to put my remarks below in the PR ? Or in the orignal repo ?
The whole process is pretty new to me an not obvious (yet) 😅

[boisgera]

Hi!

@boisgera am I supposed to put my remarks below in the PR ? Or in the orignal repo ? The whole process is pretty new to me an not obvious (yet) 😅

Most of the time, you create issues in the original repo and you mention the JOSS review issue so that we can track everything from here. The JOSS issue is the "meta-issue" if you wish. For specific cases, you may also create some pull requests for the original project.

And of course if there is something that does not fit into a project issue (e.g. a question about the JOSS process), you may add a comment here, for myself and/or the project author.