1. Changes since Release 2018.1
      1. Headline features
      2. New dependency support
      3. Core
      4. Heart
      5. Future Plans

Please mention any changes to the code which will break users' code here - to be put in the release notes for the next release. Also mention any significant improvements or new features.

The real definitive release notes will be written in source:trunk/docs/ReleaseNotes.html​ at the time of release. To make that process easier, please structure this page in the same manner, rather than simply copying from LatestNews.

OlderReleaseNotes -- release notes for previous releases.

Changes since Release 2018.1

Headline features

  • Chaste is now compiled with ​C++14.
  • Chaste now supports up to and including Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco).
  • The minimum required CMake version for building Chaste is now 3.5.1.
  • Installing Chaste is now even easier using the new ​docker image for Chaste.

New dependency support

  • Chaste now supports PETSc up to 3.11, Boost up to 1.70, HDF5 up to 1.10.5, Xerces up to 3.2.2, SUNDIALS up to 3.1.0 and VTK up to 8.1.
  • Chaste no longer supports PETSc < 3.6, Boost < 1.58, HDF5 < 1.8.16, XSD < 4.0.0, Xerces < 3.1.3, SUNDIALS < 2.5.0 and VTK < 6.2.

Core

  • Two new CMake build types have been added: AggressiveOpt which sets -Ofast -march=native -DNDEBUG and is good for release builds with more aggressive optimisation, and DebugOpt which sets -Og -g and is a good default for an edit-compile-debug workflow.
    • TestChasteBuildInfo.hpp is now displaying correct information for C++ compiler flags for both cmake and the old scons build system.
  • Dropping support for XSD 3.x should prevent Chaste builds from emitting warnings about deprecated std::auto_ptr.
  • The docs directory has been refactored to contain more relevant information, and now includes a ​JOSS paper about Chaste and recent publications it has enabled.
  • The unused interface Hdf5DataWriter::DefineFixedDimensionUsingMatrix() was deleted.

Heart

  • Intracellular calcium is now converted consistently into milliMolar within the action potential models and so the method AbstractCardiacCellInterface::GetIntracellularCalciumConcentration() (used by mechanics models) always returns calcium in milliMolar. Note that this has changed the state variable ordering in the PyCML-generated C++ models, so any archives of these variables will need to be updated.
  • Tweaks to SteadyStateRunner class which might provide a speed-up for getting certain action potential models to steady state, by removing maximum time step from CVODE and solving separately during stimulus and non-stimulus regions.
  • The behaviour of AbstractCardiacProblem<>::SetOutputNodes() and SingleTraceOutputModifier has been altered. When running in parallel node indices into the original mesh are now automatically converted to indices into then permuted runtime mesh.

Future Plans

  • This is the last release of Chaste to support Xerces < 3.1.2.