Where is Pysim right now?
As mentioned in the previous article Pysim has been used in-house at SSPA for some years now, and now has a revision number larger than 1 but smaller than two. Before launching Pysim to the world there are some breaking changes both in architecture and api that I would like to do. Thus the first public Pysim will be versioned as Pysim 2.0. In these days were 0.1 is the new 1.0 this might seem strange and overconfident (Is the project really that mature), but it is the only way to not mess up dependancies in-house at SSPA.
So what breaking changes do I want to do?
Python Systems
The first and perhaps most important is to allow for Python systems. Right now when you create a system it has to be in C++. But sometimes it is nice to be able to prototype with the quickness of Python, and sacrifice the speed of C++. When everything is working, or at least seems feasible to work in Python the system can be implemented in C++.
More flexible inputs
All the individual systems communicate with something called “inputs” and “outputs”. The output of one system can be the input to another system, making it possible to build simulations of multiple systems. Normally the inputs/outputs are either doubles or arrays of doubles. This is fine when running the simulation, but when setting up a system more flexibility is needed. It would sometimes be nice to be able to pass a python dict to a system for example. But it would not be very common to pass dicts between systems during the simulation. So a new type of variable for systems are needed, “parameters”. The parameters of a system can only be set before the simulation, and cannot be connected to other systems. So in this regard it is more limited. But the type of parameters could be much more flexible, for example dicts, strings, variable length arrays, etc.
Automatic tests
Pysim has used in house infrastructure at SSPA to perform the tests. Since it now is open source it is natural to do these tests at services like Travis CI (for Linux and Mac OS) and AppVeyor (for Windows). Most of this has been done, but some things remain, such as builds for Mac OS. I have built Pysim under Mac OS for testing purposes, but there is not yet automatic building and tests under Travis CI.
Where will Pysim be?
My ambition is to release a beta of Pysim 2.0.0 at the first of July, even if these changes are not yet implemented. But with any luck they will be!