What’s new in NEST 3.9

This page contains a summary of important breaking and non-breaking changes from NEST 3.8 to NEST 3.9. 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 an earlier version, please see our extensive transition guide from NEST 2.x to 3.0 and the list of updates for previous releases in the 3.x series.

The release of 3.9 brought a lot of changes with 110 PRs including 19 bug fixes and 10 enhancements. Here are some of the more interesting developments that happened:

Model improvements

• Biologically-inspired features added to e-prop plasticity

  See E-prop plasticity examples

• The tripartite connectivity, used for Astrocytes, now supports multiple primary connection rules.

  See Astrocyte examples

Documentation additions

• We now have a detailed description of neuron models in NEST, inclduding update algorithm and neuron types.

• We updated the Built-in timers section to include a graphical description of a simulation run focusing on timers.

• For Windows users, we added a helpful guide to get NEST running on that platform with Docker.