implementing-graphology.md

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Implementing graphology

Although the graphology npm package proposes its reference implementation, graphologyis actually only a specification for a JavaScript/TypeScript Graph that anyone remains free to implement however they like.

What's more, any custom implementation of graphology remains completely able to use all of the standard library and type declarations, without any additional complications.

Graphs are complex structures and, while we designed the reference implementation to handle most common cases with good performance, there is no silver bullet and one will always be able to implement the present specifications in a more performant fashion for very specific use cases.

If you wish to implement graphology on your own and want to be sure you are doing it correctly, know that it is possible to test your own implementation against the lib's unit tests.

Running the unit tests

First, you need to install graphology and mocha from npm:

npm install --save-dev graphology mocha

Then you need to create a file that will be run by mocha:

// test.js
import specs from 'graphology/specs';
import Graph from 'my-custom-graphology-implementation';

module.exports = specs(Graph, Graph);

Arguments

• class function: the Graph class of your implementation.
• implementation object: an object containing the rest of the implementation (alternative constructors, errors). Note that most of the time, or at least if you export your implementation through CommonJS, the class and implementation arguments will be the same.

Then, run the tests using mocha:

mocha -u exports test.js