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Opened by Sébastien Villemot@sebastienOwner

Decide minimal MATLAB version requirement for Dynare 4.7

We need to decide what will be the minimal version of MATLAB required to run Dynare 4.7.

For Dynare 4.6, our policy has been to support MATLAB versions that are at most 10 years old.

Assuming that Dynare 4.7 is released in 2021, keeping the same policy would imply raising the minimal MATLAB version to R2011a or R2011b (depending on the exact release date).

But we could also decide to change our policy and support less versions. For example, we could go for a 5-years windows, which would imply R2016a or R2016b. Or we could choose something between 5 and 10 years.

Relevant to this discussion is the list of MATLAB incompatibilities across versions. Here are the main benefits that would bring certain requirements:

  • R2013a: we could get rid of the hack needed to support intersect(…, 'stable')
  • R2014a: we could easily install the minimal required MATLAB version on modern GNU/Linux systems (currently we need a hack to create an artificial eth0 device with the correct MAC address)
  • R2016a: we could drop the support for 32-bit versions, which would halve the size of the Windows installer and simplify the build process
  • R2016b: we could use automatic broadcasting in many places, instead of the obscure bsxfun syntax
Edited by Sébastien Villemot