Where is the GUI?

• The drag-and-drop user interface for constructing an analysis network, based on the ViPEr project of Michel Sanner's group, was a demo and was never intended for release. We stopped developing this user interface some years ago. The present release is command-line driven, and offers far more power than an execution engine limited to direct acyclic graphs. If the DANSE project is funded, user interface development will return.

Can I use this software to analyze my data from [Pharos, MARI, MAPS, HET, LRMECS, HRMECS, Merlin?]?

• The beta release does not support data reduction from most of these instruments. The beta release has support for data reduction on ARCS and Pharos. Adapting the instrument description components and support for reading data files from other such instruments is planned over the next few months. Tentative priorities are better support for Pharos and LRMECS data.

Doesn't Python make the software run slower?

• Yes, but the amount can be imperceptible. We have made every effort to design the software so that intensive computations were written in C++, and given Python bindings. McStas simulations have been benchmarked as both compiled C code and as scripted applications running under the pyre framework. The difference in performance was less than 1%. Python gives the flexibility to quickly iterate through a variety of instrument or sample simulations, for example, and avoids compiler issues at runtime.

Can I use the software on a computer running MSWindows?

• Yes, there are currently three ways that you can run on a Windows platform. There are Windows binaries available (coming soon!) for download for the current official release. Alternately, if you have a C compiler, you can build from the source tarball. A third possibility is to use cygwin, and install from the source tarball (or the ARCS repository) using pyre's native build system (config).

• windows
• macintosh