CasADi 3.1 released

[Joel Andersson]

Hi all,

We're happy to announce the release of CasADi 3.1! These are the major changes:

• CasADi is now available for Octave and Python 3.x, in addition to MATLAB, Python 2.x and C++
  
• We have added an interface to the open-source MINLP solver Bonmin, which is also shipped with CasADi, no need for a separate installation
  
• MINLP support was added to KNITRO
• A reworked version of blockSQP was added to CasADi. This is an NLP solver which is particularly suitable for NLPs where the Hessian has block structure, such as NLPs arising from direct multiple shooting discretizations. For more information on the original code, see http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12532-016-0101-2. CasADi's fork of blockSQP in particular adds automatic detection of the block structure and a much looser coupling to the HSL linear solvers, essential to be able to distribute the code precompiled. We encourage people to try out this code, but caution that it's still work in progress. We hope to continue to improve this code and add new features to it such as a feasibility restoration phase and support for exact Hessian SQP.
• The interface to the SUNDIALS integrators has undergone a major revision. The new code should scale much better to larger dimension than before, especially when used for sensitivity analysis. We have also updated the version of SUNDIALS to 2.6.1. A major change is that we no longer support SUNDIALS built-in linear solvers. Instead, you have to use one of the linear solvers interfaced to CasADi (default is CSparse). Keep this in mind when migrating existing code to CasADi 3.1.
  
• The support for C code generation and just-in-time compilation has been improved. Set option "jit" to true for an integrator or NLP solver to just-in-time compile all auto-generated functions. Note that our binary distributions include a Clang-based just-in-time compiler.
  
• We've added an interface to the block structure exploiting QP solver HPMPC.

See also https://github.com/casadi/casadi/wiki/Changes-v3.0.0-to-v3.1.0

Best regards,

Joel