Interested in GSoC 2026: Package Brian’s unit system (175/350 h)

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Hi Brian Simulator Team,

My name is Siddhant, and I am a software engineering student very interested in the project to package Brian’s unit system as a standalone library for GSoC 2026.

I have been exploring brian2/units/fundamentalunits.py and I’m fascinated by how Brian handles dimensional analysis with NumPy. I’m particularly interested in the challenge of decoupling this from the core while maintaining performance and NumPy 2.0 compatibility.

My Background:

I have previously contributed( raised 2 pr’s) to INCF #52( docs: fix incorrect Windows venv activation path #52 by ulekarsiddhant0-boop · Pull Request #66 · INCF/knowledge-space-agent · GitHub ) and #63( test: implement unit tests for knowledge-space api logic #63 by ulekarsiddhant0-boop · Pull Request #65 · INCF/knowledge-space-agent · GitHub )so, I am familiar with the workflow.

I have also contributed to the Apache Software Foundation (2 PRs), where I gained experience working with large-scale codebase infrastructure and rigorous CI/CD standards.

I am comfortable with modern Python packaging (pyproject.toml, setuptools) and unit testing with pytest.

My Initial Thoughts: I’ve started looking at how we might handle interoperability with other libraries like Pint. Should the primary goal be making Brian’s units “convertible” to Pint, or is the focus purely on extracting the current SI-base-unit logic into a dependency-free package first?

I’ve already set up my local environment and passed the unit tests. I’d love to know if there are any “good first issues” or specific refactoring tasks you’d recommend I look at to better understand the current unit-coupling.

Best regards,

ulekarsiddhant0-boop

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Hi @gsocsid123 Sorry just a quick reply that does not go into the details of your question, but: please note that we are not offering work on the unit system as a project this year. You probably saw it listed on a document that was put up by accident on the INCF website, which listed the projects from 2024. The work for the unit system packaging is mostly done, see GitHub - brian-team/QuantSI: Work in progress: unit system as used by the Brian2 simulator

Please be a bit patient, INCF will hopefully upload the 2026 projects in the coming days.

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Hi mstimberg,

Thank you so much for the quick heads-up! I appreciate you pointing me toward QuantSI—I’ll definitely take a look at the repo to see how the packaging was implemented, as it aligns perfectly with my interest in infrastructure and standalone library development.

Since I’ve already set up my Brian2 environment and have experience with both INCF and the Apache Software Foundation, I’m still very keen on contributing to Brian Simulator for GSoC 2026.

I will wait for the official INCF 2026 ideas list to be uploaded. In the meantime, if there are any other infrastructure, performance-related, or ‘Just-in-Time’ compilation projects you are considering for this year, I’d love to start exploring those areas early.

Looking forward to the 2026 list!

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Hi @gsocsid123 in case you didn’t see it yet, the list is now online at Google Summer of Code | INCF

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