gym-socket-api

This is an API for accessing Gymnasium from other programming languages. It is intended to scale up to difficult, high-dimensional environments without being slow.

Installation

To download the code, run:

git clone https://github.com/gmlewis/gym-socket-api

To install the dependencies, run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Server

You can spin up a new server like so:

python .

By default, this will listen on port 5001. You can change the port using the --port flag:

python . --port 1337

To run in debug mode, add -d:

python . -d

Client

Go client: See binding-go/demo/cartpole to jump right into the Go bindings. If you'd like a more comprehensive guide, see the Godoc.

Why?

Here are some reasons why gym-socket-api is needed:

Performance: games like Atari Pong generate video frames many times a second. It should be possible to play games like this faster than real-time. Since gym-http-api is committed to JSON, serializing and deserializing video frames is extremely slow. In contrast, gym-socket-api can achieve over 300 FPS on games like Atari Pong.

Session management: when a client process exits ungracefully (e.g. from Ctrl+C), the language bindings should clean up any resources that the process allocated. This means that, for example, any GUI windows related to the environment should be closed. Since gym-http-api does not use persistent sockets or timeouts, it cannot do this.

Stability: I've had the gym-http-api server crash on me before. With gym-socket-api, each client gets its own server process. This way, even a segmentation fault can't bring down the server.