Status of demes-slim

[vsbuffalo]

Hi Graham,

I'd like to use a model in the demes format with slim (in my case, I can ignore migration). Is demes-slim mature enough to use it for this purpose?

Thanks,
Vince

[grahamgower]

Hi Vince,

I suspect that this has suffered some bitrot. The demes-slim project was never polished, in large part because there didn't seem to be anyone interested in using it (you're the first person that has asked about it!). It was targeting SLiM v3.7 or so, and should work with that version (subject to the open issues regarding migrations/pulses). Some small fixes are likely needed to work with multispecies versions of SLiM because various object properties got shuffled around (SLiM >= 4.0?).

In any event, it probably would be a good idea to look at output from the DRY_RUN option to the initialise.slim file, which prints the script blocks that are scheduled to run and then exits. Honestly, I was never really happy with how the Demes events were mapped to SLiM generations (I forget the details, but some things like migrations happen only in the generation after you ask for them), but it should be fine unless you're doing weird things with rescaling and also have short time intervals between events.