New features

BngSimulator, an interface to all simulators provided by BioNetGen: ODE, partitioned-leaping, SSA (stochastic) and NFsim (network-free stochastic). See pysb.simulator.bng.BngSimulator (#272).

General improvements

• Faster and more memory-efficient construction of ODEs from rules (#293).
• ScipyOdeSimulator is faster in "pure Python" mode (i.e. without weave and a C compiler installed). It now also supports a somewhat broader range of sympy expressions in reaction rates. Also an experimental use_theano option has been added which uses theano rather than weave for evaluating differential equation expressions. Note that PySB users who previously depended on scipy.weave for fast C translation of ODE expressions must now install the standalone weave package, as this module has been removed from scipy (#294).
• StochKitSimulator adds support for models with expressions. Also the simulation setup process is now faster.
• Performance benchmarking and regression testing with Airspeed Velocity (#275). We will eventually work out a way to automatically execute the test suite and publish the results, but for now anyone who's interested in this would have to run it themselves.
• Continuous Integration for Windows with AppVeyor (#263).

Bugfixes

• Accessing SimulationResult.all no longer crashes when unicode strings are used for observable or expression names under Python 2 (#291, issue #290). We thought we fixed the whole unicode-and-numpy issue here back in #245, but apparently we missed a spot.
• MatlabExporter now correctly handles empty observables, i.e. observables whose pattern doesn't match any reachable species (#289).
• Some code errors in the tutorial (module/class names that didn't get updated during a code refactoring) have been corrected (#286). Thanks to Michael Retchin for catching this.