v3.5.24 Milestone with mcstas-antlr support, NCrystal on Windows

What's Changed

Important note

• McStas and McXtrace will soon change organisation-name on GitHub - from McStasMcXtrace -> mccode-dev

User interfaces and tools

• [Feature] mcgui/mxgui Let configuration dialogue spawn your EDITOR to edit your local mccode_config.json
  by @willend in #1838 (available also by --edit-user-config from mcrun/mxrun)
• [Feature] mcrun/mxrun: New switch --cogen to allow on-demand switch to non-standard code generator.
  See also interoperability with mccode-antlr below
  by @willend in #1851
• [Feature] mcrun/mxrun Solution for picking up code generator from PATH if not found where expected
  by @willend in #1840
• [Feature] pygen minor revision: Build importable make() function and call from generic notebook
  by @willend in #1827
• [Fix] Support Scintilla editor on Debian with Qt6
  by @willend in #1813
• [Fix] Drop hard-coded check for PyQt5
  by @willend in #1814
• [Fix] No more hidden Perl dependencies! (perl -> python 1-liner readlinkf())
  by @willend in #1824
• [Fix] too-restrictive mcdisplay/mxdisplay instrument line parsing
  by @g5t in #1834
• [Fix] Patches for mcdisplay/mxdisplay in Windows
  from @LelandWH #1853

Components and instruments

• [Fix] McStas Vertical_bender: Add max iteration criterion for while loop (default 1000).
  by @willend in #1815
• [Fix] McStas NCrystal_sample: Remove possible out-of-bounds memory access
  by @g5t in #1821
• [Fix] McStas Elliptic_guide_gravity and Pol_mirror: Minor comp revisions, suppresses compilation warnings from clang
  by @willend in #1826
• [Fix] McStas SNS_ARCS.instr edits
  by @willend in #1838
• [Fix] McStas ISIS_IMAT.instr DEPENDENCY " @NEXUSFLAGS@ " added
  by @willend in #1839
• [Fix] McStas Union_master Adjustment of default parameter
  by @willend in #1840
• [Fix] McStas Union-related fixes and imports from DMSC school
  by @willend in #1841
• [Fix] McStas Elliptical_guide_gravity did not work in GROUPS as it always SCATTERS
  by @mads-bertelsen in #1843
• [Fix] Monitor_nD on GPU: Adjustments for coherence between CPU and GPU particle lists
  by @willend in #1816

Core simulation toolkit

• [Feature] NeXus: sort comp instances by index and include comp parameter information
  by @willend in #1828
• [Fix] Increased stability in NeXus x wide MPI
  by @willend in #1811
• [Fix] Portability, Windows + cl.exe: Remove variable length array allocations for issue #1817
  by @g5t in #1819 and
  #1818 by @willend in #1822

Interfaces and interoperability with other codes

NCrystal

• Thanks to @tkittel for ping-pong on this :)
• [Feature] McStas 3.5.24 and later now depends on NCrystal 4.0.0 and later. NCrystal is now available also on Windows!
  by @willend in #1848 and #1855

mccode-antlr

• Thanks to @g5t for ping-pong on this :)
• [Feature] mccode-antlr is an alternative code-generator for McStas and McXtrace - a new development by @g5t and based on ANTLR instead of lex/yacc. The new tool is mainly written in python and thus has a lower barrier for changes in language syntax and code generation. The tool implementations mcstas-antlr and mcxtrace-antlr are thus a candidate implementations to potentially replace the classic mcstas and mcxtrace code generators in the future. Current status is that
  • McStas: mcstas-antlr is fully feature complete wrt. mcstas for CPU simulations and close to complete for GPU simulations
  • McXtrace: Not all instruments will compile using mcxtrace-antlr but basic functionality is in place
  • To try:
    1. Install mccode-antlr from conda-forge or via pip
    2. Adapt your configuration to use e.g. mcstas-antlr by
    • Setting the new --cogen=mcstas-antlr option in mcrun
    • Enable or edit the MCCOGEN field of mccode_config.json using the new Save/Edit configuration in mcgui
    • (The antlr tools default to download comps etc. to an internal cache: Add e.g. -I${MCSTAS} to prefer ingredients fromyour local library)
    3. Use the mcrun-antlr/mxrun-antlr tools provided directly by mccode-antlr

Platform support

• Debian/Ubuntu
  • [Fix] Make hidden numpy dependency explicit also on Debian by @willend in #1825
  • [Fix] McXtrace meta-pkgs for Debian add libgsl-dev as dependency by @farhi in #185
• Windows
  • [Feature] NCrystal is now available with McStas on Windows
  • [Info] Windows via cross-compiled .exeinstaller from mccode.org:
    Please place the MCPL-related .bat files from the extras folder in e.g. c:\mcstas-3.5.24\bin to enable MCPL
    (May require giving your user 'full access' permissions to the bin folder)
  • [Info] Windows via conda-forge: MCPL is not yet available but expected during the spring

Full Changelog: v3.5.16...v3.5.24