Survey: MATLAB users / continuation of AMICI's MATLAB interface

[dweindl]

Currently, AMICI's MATLAB interface is in a rather sad state. This is mostly due to breaking changes in the symbolic math handling in R2018A. I don't think that requiring R2017B is a sustainable solution (e.g. due to limited C+17 compiler support there and incompatibility with more recent MATLAB features). Also, we are planning to get rid of at least the model import from MATLAB, because maintaining both the Python and MATLAB model import requires too many resources.

Current options seems to be:

1. Maintaining some reduced MATLAB interface that is compatible with current MATLAB releases. This would mean dropping model import via MATLAB and require using the Python package (through MATLAB or externally), potentially with a very thin MATLAB interface. For the actual simulation, we could keep the current interface (with its limited functionality compared to AMICI's Python interface) or require using the Python modules (again, potentially with a thin MATLAB wrapper). Somewhat outlined here.
2. Dropping MATLAB support completely

In order to move forward here, it would be great to know how many MATLAB AMICI users there still are. I would be happy to get a brief comment from MATLAB users, indicating whether they would like to continue using AMICI through MATLAB, and if so, which type of models you are using (SBML vs plain MATLAB). In case we continue supporting MATLAB, any contributions for setting that up / maintaining that would be highly welcomed.