Friday, 30 May 2008

Released idmclib 0.10.0

A new version of the idmclib has been released.
The API is backward compatible, so that any project using previous versions of the library can switch to this new release efforthlessy.

Beside the usual (minor) bug fixes, this release display some important changes:
  • added TCL bindings
  • added a new 'attractor' module
  • upgraded documentation
  • upgraded dependency on the 5.1.x series of the Lua library
As a demo of the capabilities of the new TCL bindings, a command line script which computes trajectories of discrete and continuous models has been added to the source distribution.
TCL bindings will allow much easier testing of old and new C code, and the eventual development of special purpose, cross-platform applications. In this respect, the Tk toolkit is also a valid option for prototyping GUIs around crude library functionalities.

The new attractor module has been added mostly for internal use, and provides data structures and methods for handling sets of arbitrary-dimensional points (which can be read, for instance, as 'attractors'), and lists of those lists of points.

Finally, some words on the Lua upgrade. Until version 0.9.0, the idmclib was based on the release 5.0.x of the Lua library. This was released on April 2003, and got last update on on 26 Jun 2006. Now development of series 5.0.x seems to be stalled, so the need to upgrade to the more recent release of the Lua library: 5.1.3. This new version has some interesting new features, is considerably easier to compile and, most important, is actively maintained.