2023 05 22 Open NEST Developer Video Conference

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Agenda

1. Welcome
2. Review of NEST User Mailing List
3. Project team round
4. In-depth discussion
   • Plans what needs to be done before next hackathon
   • Transition of C++ standards, to C++17 (?)
   • backprop with spiking neurons

Mailing list

• https://nest-simulator.org/mailinglist

Project team round

Here we discuss topics that need broader attention, for example questions that came up but are outside a single project's scope, larger planned changes/PRs that affect all teams or pending work that is blocked by external factors.

1. Models / NESTML
   • busy with workshops, gathered couple of doc PRs
   • Working on gap-junction support
   • planning strategy meeting in the next weeks
2. NEST GPU
   • no report
3. PyNEST
   • ported a lot of tests during last hackathon
   • nothing much else to report
4. NEST Desktop
   • no report
5. Kernel
   • nothing to report
6. Installation
   • various fixes during hackathon
   • nothing much else to report
7. Infrastructure
   • cleanup of MacOS build in the CI #2762
8. Documentation
   • #2781 looking for reviewers on "spatial" code docs
   • business as usual
9. EBRAINS
   • site installations are almost complete
   • EBRAINS software release, needs next NEST release (!)

In-depth discussion

Plans what needs to be done before next hackathon

Topics:

• developer documentation builds
• NEST 4 user interface; EXABRAINPREP++
• Maybe C++ standard transition

Transition of C++ standards, to C++17 (?)

• Reason for old standards are mainly HPC machines with proprietary compilers not supporting newest standards.

• New standards offer many more readable and maintainable code structures (meta-programming vs. templates, …)

• C++20 seems more complete than moving to C++17 first

  • which compilers already support significant amount of the new features
    • https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/20
    • GCC seems to be most widely used and supports C++20 most completely (only modules currently listed as partial)

• need process how to decide primary used C++ standard

  • discuss in NEST Board meeting due to political implications
  • switch to newer standard and see where things break?

• transition code in-passing, i.e. when touching code, update where possible.

  • new standard is allowed, old standards are possible
  • maybe coordinated move to range-based for loops? – Handle also "in-passing".

• Needs to be written into the NEST developer documentation: coding guidelines