The release once again combines a number of necessary fixes with numerous new features:
Lastly, we had a remaining Windows build issue. Also, Brian Ripley and Uwe Ligges kindly sent us a small patch supporting the new Windows 64-bit builds using the new MinGW 64-bit compiler for Windows -- so release 0.7.5 may follow in due course.
The NEWS file entry for release 0.7.4 is as follows:
0.7.4 2010-01-30 o matrix matrix-like indexing using operator() for all vector types : IntegerVector, NumericVector, RawVector, CharacterVector LogicalVector, GenericVector and ExpressionVector. o new class Rcpp::Dimension to support creation of vectors with dimensions. All vector classes gain a constructor taking a Dimension reference. o an intermediate template class "SimpleVector" has been added. All simple vector classes are now generated from the SimpleVector template : IntegerVector, NumericVector, RawVector, CharacterVector LogicalVector. o an intermediate template class "SEXP_Vector" has been added to generate GenericVector and ExpressionVector. o the clone template function was introduced to explicitely clone an RObject by duplicating the SEXP it encapsulates. o even smarter wrap programming using traits and template meta-programming using a private header to be include only RcppCommon.h o the as template is now smarter. The template now attempts to build an object of the requested template parameter T by using the constructor for the type taking a SEXP. This allows third party code to create a class Foo with a constructor Foo(SEXP) to have asfor free. o wrap becomes a template. For an object of type T, wrap uses implicit conversion to SEXP to first convert the object to a SEXP and then uses the wrap(SEXP) function. This allows third party code creating a class Bar with an operator SEXP() to have wrap for free. o all specializations of wrap : wrap , wrap< vector > use coercion to deal with missing values (NA) appropriately. o configure has been withdrawn. C++0x features can now be activated by setting the RCPP_CXX0X environment variable to "yes". o new template r_cast to facilitate conversion of one SEXP type to another. This is mostly intended for internal use and is used on all vector classes o Environment now takes advantage of the augmented smartness of as and wrap templates. If as makes sense, one can directly extract a Foo from the environment. If wrap makes sense then one can insert a Bar directly into the environment. Foo foo = env["x"] ; /* as is used */ Bar bar ; env["y"] = bar ; /* wrap is used */ o Environment::assign becomes a template and also uses wrap to create a suitable SEXP o Many more unit tests for the new features; also added unit tests for older API
As always, even fuller details are in the ChangeLog on the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page