Hello world!

Installing the command line interface (CLI):

First, you need to install the Palang CLI.

Ubuntu

snap install palang

Debian

apt install palang

Writing your first Palang program

The simplest way to write a Palang program is to create a .palang file anywhere on your computer.

Let's create hello_world.palang.

The Palang programming language has three fundamental constructs: model, prompt and function.

• Models describe the format of data which is given as input and obtained as output of prompts and functions.
• Prompts describe in human language a task to accomplish. The task will be accomplished using a large language model.
• Functions are normal programming language functions. You can define variables, use operators and invoke other functions and prompts.

For this example, we will define a prompt called greet, which will ask the LLM to say "Hello world!".

The prompt will not accept any input and will return a string of text (std::Text).

module tutorials

prompt greet() -> std::Text {
    Say "Hello world!" and nothing else.
}

Compiling your first Palang program

To run your program, you need to first compile it into an assembly language called palasm, this is the language that the Palang virtual machine understands.

To compile your program, run:

palang compile --source ./hello_world.palang --target ./hello_world.palasm

If you did everything correctly, you now have a hello_world.palasm file in your working directory.

Creating a profile to tell Palang which LLM to use

Before you can run your program, we need to talk briefly about profiles.

Profiles are .yaml files that tell the Palang virtual machine which LLM service to use (OpenAI, Groq, Ollama, etc.), which model to use in the service and other metadata like the temperature and max_tokens.

In this tutorial, we are going to use Groq. Not only is Groq very fast thank to their specialized hardware, but at the time of writing this tutorial Groq also has a generous free-tier. That makes it a great service for a beginner.

The profile .yaml files are usually stored in ~/.local/share/palang/profiles for usage by the local user only and in /usr/share/palang/profiles for system wide usage by all users.

You can also specify you own directory for profiles using the --profiles-directory argument when running palang run [...].

For this tutorial, we will create our profile for Groq under ~/.local/share/palang/profiles/groq_llama3_70b.yaml.

Here is the contents of the profile:

llm: groq
model: llama3-70b-8192
temperature: 1
max_tokens: 1024

Running your first Palang program

You now have everything you need to run your first Palang program!

In the terminal, run:

palang run ./hello_world.palasm --task tutorials/greet --profile groq_llama3_70b

You should get the following response:

Hello world!

Next tutorial

Now that you have written and ran your first Palang program, you are ready to learn about Writing a prompt with custom inputs and outputs.