Developers Meeting Notes 5/25/12

At the Developers Meeting on 5/25/12 we discussed the following:

• The group discussed the release of OpenMx 1.2.4. This binary release addresses many memory leaks that existed in previous releases of OpenMx. The remaining memory leaks seem to exist in mxAlgebra. The group discussed attempting to identify these leaks in the future using the Valgrind.
• Rhyne is implementing a weight matrix using polychoric correlations in the front end of OpenMx. The implementation would speedup significantly with the use of gradients. Rhyne is going to explore using Tim's smart gradients to achieve these speedups.
• Ross is exploring using the R package 'inline' to serve as a bridge between the front-end and back-end of OpenMx. Currently Ross is exploring how the package supports memory allocation and if any of the implementation of OpenMx needs to be refactored to meet the requirements of 'inline'.
• The group discussed several cosmetic changes to the OpenMx website.
• The group discussed changing the mxPath man pages to specify the default option for the connect argument of mxPath.
• Steve relayed some feedback he had gotten from users about supplying standard error estimates in the summary information for RAM models. Michael Spiegel will be integrating a function to supply these standard errors written by Ryne on the forums into the OpenMx code base for RAM models.
• The group discussed several new debugging tools for OpenMx developers. Including finding memory leaks on mac development platforms with the new version of LLVM.