License, Distribution and Installation

simuPOP is distributed under a GPL license and is hosted athttp://simupop.sourceforge.net, the world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications. simuPOP is available on any platform where Python is available, and is currently tested under both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows (Windows 2000 and later), Linux (Redhat and Ubuntu), MacOS X and Sun Solaris systems. Different C++ compilers such as Microsoft Visual C++, gcc and Intel icc are supported under different operating systems. Standard installation packages are provided for Windows, Linux, and MacOS X systems.

If a binary distribution is unavailable for a specific platform, it is usually easy to compile simuPOP from source, following the standard ``python setup.py install'' procedure. Please refer to the installation section of the simupop website for instructions for specific platforms and compilers.

simuPOP is available for Python 2.4 and later, including the new Python 3.x releases. Although Python 3 is incompatible with Python 2 in many ways, examples in this guide are written in a style that is compatible with both versions of Python. Some non-classic usages include the use of a//b instead of a/b for floored division and list(range(3)) instead of range(3) for sequece [0,1,2] In particular, we use

print("Population size is %d" % size)

instead of

print "Population size is %d" % size

to output strings because the former is valid in Python 2.x (print a tuple with one element) and will generate the same output in Python 3.x. Of course, users of simuPOP can choose to use other styles.

Thanks to the ‘glue language’ nature of Python, it is easy to inter-operate with other applications within a simuPOP script. For example, users can call any R function from Python/simuPOP for the purposes of visualization and statistical analysis, using R and a Python module RPy. Because simuPOP utility modules such as simuPOP.plotter and simuPOP.sampling makes use of R and rpy (not rpy2) to plot figures, it is hihgly recommended that you install R and RPy with simuPOP. In addition, although simuPOP uses the standard Tkinter GUI toolkit when a graphical user interface is needed, it can make use of a wxPython toolkit if it is available.