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DiscreteEvents news

v0.3.5

(released 2023-02-23)

  • updated compat
  • removed multi-threading (parallel clocks) from export and docs

v0.3.1

(released 2020-09-16) A few days after the release of v0.3.0 Hector Perez contributed some macros to make the DiscreteEvents API more Julian for common cases:

  • @event: wraps fun and event! into one call,
  • @periodic: wraps fun and periodic! into one call,
  • @process: wraps Prc and process! into one call,
  • @wait: simplified call of wait!,

The following macros provide syntactic sugar to existing functions:

  • @delay: calls delay!,
  • @run!: calls run!.

v0.3.0

(released 2020-09-11) v0.3.0 was a significant improvement over 0.2.0 with a name change, multi-threading, resource handling and a streamlined documentation (announcement on Julia discourse).

Breaking Name Changes

  • following the advice on discourse and in issue #13 Simulate.jl was renamed to DiscreteEvents.jl. Github maintains and forwards the links.
  • there are further renamings to make the API more consistent:
    • Simfunction → fun, SF is no longer defined,
    • SimProcess → Prc, SP is no longer defined,
    • SimEvent → DiscreteEvent,
    • SimCond → DiscreteCond,
    • sample! → periodic!, was a name collision with Distributions.jl.
    • reset! → resetClock!, was a name collision with DataStructures.jl

Streamlined Documentation

  • the documentation has been reduced to minimal introductory examples and API documentation,
  • everything else (explanations, further examples, notebooks, benchmarks) has been moved to a companion site: DiscreteEventsCompanion.

New Functionality in v0.3.0

  • Action is introduced as synonym for Union{Function,Expr,Tuple},
  • thereby in addition to fun, you can now schedule arbitrary function closures as events,
  • periodic! takes an Action as argument,
  • you can pass also symbols, expressions or other funs or function closures as arguments to fun. They get evaluated at event time before being passed to the event function,
  • DiscreteEvents.version gives now the package version,
  • DiscreteEvents.jl is now much faster due to optimizations,
  • onthread allows simulations with asynchronous tasks (processes and actors) to run much faster on threads other than 1,
  • Resource provides an API for modeling limited resources,
  • you can now create a real time clock RTClock and schedule events to it (experimental),
  • actors can register their message channels to the clock.channels vector and the clock will not proceed before they are empty,
  • processes and actors (asynchronous tasks) can transfer IO-operations to the clock with now! or print directly via the clock,
  • event! and delay! now also accept stochastic time variables (a Distribution),
  • there is a n keyword parameter for the number of repeat event!s,
  • you can seed the thread-specific RNGs with pseed!.

Multi-Threading (Experimental)

  • The data structure of Clock has been changed, it now has a field ac providing channels to parallel clocks,
  • PClock sets up a clock with parallel active clocks on each available thread,
  • with pclock all parallel clocks can be accessed and referenced,
  • process! can now start tasks on parallel threads,
  • event! can now schedule events for execution on parallel threads,
  • periodic! can now register sampling functions or expressions to parallel clocks,
  • if setup with parallel clocks, Clock becomes the master to drive them and synchronize with them at each Δt time step,

Other Breaking Changes in v0.3.0

  • τ as an alias for tau is no longer defined.
  • The macros @tau, @val, @SF, @SP are no longer defined.
  • Logging functions have been removed (they were not useful enough).
  • A function f given to Prc must now take a Clock-variable as its first argument.
  • The first ::Clock-argument to delay! and wait! and now! can no longer be omitted. Since the task function has now a Clock-variable available (see above), it must provide it to delay!, wait! and now.
  • event! no longer accepts a Vector as argument.
  • Clk as alias of 𝐶 is no longer provided.
  • event! now returns nothing.
  • event! and periodic! now doesn't take anymore the scope as an argument. Symbols or expressions given to them or included in funs are only evaluated in Main scope: this feature therefore can be used only by end users but not by any packages using DiscreteEvents.jl.

Deprecated functionality in v0.3.0

  • Evaluating expressions or symbols at global scope is much slower than using functions and gives now a one time warning. This functionality may be removed entirely in a future version. (Please write an issue if you want to keep it.)