I started working on Percival with the goal of making data analysis more accessible to people. Programmers have developed tools like relational query languages and plotting libraries for working with data, but it's difficult to share the *process* with others. Why can't we have a powerful interactive notebook that runs fully in the browser? Percival combines the flexibility of Datalog as a query language for relational data with the beauty of exploratory visualization grammars. These declarative components interact through a reactive dataflow system. Because Percival uses web technologies (including Web Workers for multithreaded, sandboxed execution), fully-interactive notebooks can be shared with anyone on the Internet, making data analyses more tangible to others. At the core of Percival is a custom Datalog compiler, built with Rust and WebAssembly, which integrates with its notebook runtime. This compiles the query language to JavaScript through a staged evaluation process that also allows users to embed their own JavaScript code. The interface aims to be lightweight, friendly, and accessible, and there is no hidden workspace state. This is an early-stage research project, and we welcome your feedback, so please feel free to say hello here, or at our GitHub discussions page! https://percival.ink/ https://github.com/ekzhang/percival

Percival

A reactive language for data analysis and visualization

A reactive language for data analysis and visualization