ADMB Project

ADMB-11.4
Released May 29, 2015

Describe changes and features for each release.

Release Notes

The goals for all releases are

Default safe libs include overflows checks.
Changes to derivative checker prompts.
Added description documentation to the programming interface.
Improvements to admb scripts (see New Features).
Added more unit tests for improved code coverage.
Fixed reported and found bugs.
Fixed compilers warnings.
Add more checks in admb scripts to test for errors.
Added Quickstart*.txt markup documentation for building and using ADMB.
User interface: Windows admb bash script has a .sh extension to avoid conflict with batch file. So in MinGW or Cygwin shell, user will need to use
```
[~/admb/examples/admb/simple/]$ ~/admb/admb.sh simple
```
Fixed 'admb -d' for unix, mingw and cygwin shells.
Able to use Rtools for building, but will need to use the utilities\make.exe for building.
Improved the build by restructuring and reworking the GNUmakefiles file.
Able to use parallel build option (-j) with verify and contrib targets for faster builds.
To build with optimized libraries use fast option (-f) instead of (-o).
```
$ admb -f model.tpl
```

Fix shared (libadmb.so) and dynamic (admb.dll) builds.

[~/admb/]$ make shared

C:\admb\> utilities\make shared

Note — This is great for testing linker errors.

Added contributed method to save gradient values to a file. Contributed by Jiashen Tang and David Fournier.
```
REPORT_SECTION
  save_gradients(gradients);
```
Added back the MacOS binary ADMBTerminal app.
Packaged mingw compilers (32 and 64 bit) with windows installers.
admb scripts can determine which parser (tpl2cpp or tpl2rem) to use.
```
[~/admb/examples/admb-re/union/]$ ~/admb/admb union
```

Note: Option -r is no longer needed to build the random effects model.

Note: Borland 5.5 compiler is no longer supported.

admb scripts can build C++ source files and link.

For Unix,

[~/admb/example/admb/simple/]$ ~/admb/admb simple.tpl mysource.cpp

For Windows,

C:\admb\example\admb\simple\> C:\admb\admb simple.tpl mysource.cpp

admb scripts have a new option -f for optimized library "OPT_LIB".

For Unix,

[~/admb/example/admb/simple/]$ ~/admb/admb -f simple.tpl mysource.cpp

For Windows,

C:\admb\example\admb\simple\> C:\admb\admb -f simple.tpl mysource.cpp

The following are planned or requested features for the next release.

ADMB-11.1
Released May 10, 2013

Updated Visual Studio nmake build files.
Improved Unix build files.
Only outdated files are rebuilt.
Fast parallel building with source distribution
```
[~/admb/]$ make -j
```
Building from source will create distribution folder in 'build/dist' instead of 'build/os-compiler-arch'.
Combined mulitple libraries to a single library 'libadmb.a'.
Reverted some algorithms to previous version-9 code.
The compilation scripts (adcomp, adlink, admb) compile in "safe" mode by default.
added 's' option with the Ctrl^C
contributed libraries are built with the main libraries.
flex is not needed to build ADMB, but it is needed to develop the tpl2cpp.lex and tpl2rem.lex files.
Improved documentation.

admb script can now build tpl models without the need to set ADMB_HOME or PATH. For example,
```
[~/admb-11.1/examples/admb/simple/]$ ~/admb-11.1/admb simple
```
Functions from user-contributed packages can be loaded from directory 'contrib'. Read 'contrib/README.txt'.
New class 'init_table' to read input data into a matrix.
New function sumsq() to calculate sum of squared values, equivalent to norm2().
New constant PI for 3.141593... Makes models more portable than using M_PI or other compiler-specific constants.
New shell command 'ad2csv' to write binary files to screen or to a file.
admb is now able to handle .obj, .cpp and .tpl files on the commandline.

For example,
```
$ admb model.tpl supportcode.cpp anotherfile.cpp
```
Output is executable 'model'.

For help and support, email users@admb-project.org.