What’s new in NEST 3.4¶
This page contains a summary of important breaking and non-breaking changes from NEST 3.3 to NEST 3.4. In addition to the release notes on GitHub, this page also contains transition information that helps you to update your simulation scripts when you come from an older version of NEST.
If you transition from a version earlier than 3.3, please see our extensive transition guide from NEST 2.x to 3.0 or release updates for previous releases in 3.x.
Documentation restructuring and new theme¶
NEST documentation has a new theme! We did a major overhaul of the layout and structure of the documentation. The changes aim to improve findability and access of content. With a more modern layout, our wide range of docs can be discovered more easily. The table of contents is simplified and the content is grouped based on topic (neurons, synapses etc) rather than type of documentation (e.g., ‘guides’).
Changes in NEST behavior¶
Inferred extent of spatial layers with freely placed neurons¶
Spatial layers can be created by specifying only the node positions using spatial.free
,
without explicitly specifying the extent
.
In that case, in NEST 3.4 and later, the extent
will be determined by the position of the
lower-leftmost and upper-rightmost nodes in the layer; earlier versions of NEST added a hard-coded
padding to the extent. The center
is computed as the midpoint between the lower-leftmost and
upper-rightmost nodes.
When creating a layer with only a single node, the extent
has to be specified explicitly.
Disconnect with SynapseCollection
¶
It is now possible to disconnect using a SynapseCollection
, which removes only the connections
obtained by calling GetConnections()
. The SynapseCollection
can either be passed to
nest.disconnect()
, or one may call the member function disconnect()
of the SynapseCollection
.
Deprecation information¶
Model
spike_dilutor
is now deprecated and can only be used in single-threaded mode. To implement connections which transmit spikes with fixed probability, usebernoulli_synapse
instead.