Tue, 15 Feb 2011

Rcpp 0.9.1

A new release 0.9.1 of Rcpp went to CRAN and Debian yesterday.

This version contains mostly bug-fixes and rather few enhancements. The changes are mostly 'internal fixes' and not user-facing; they mostly address some issues in memory management which, while not tripping up the unit tests or common usage, caused trouble for advanced Rcpp modules use and repeated memory allocation / deallocation. This bit Doug Bates repeatedly, and he put his head down and debugged the issue. A number of changes fairly deep-down in Rcpp (as well as in R-devel) later, this looks much better and we owe him a hearfelt Thank You!

A big Thanks! also goes to Luke Tierney who out some new memory debugging code into R-devel which the --enable-strict-barrier in R 2.13.0 (due in April) will enable. A related fix is also in R 2.12.2 due on the 25th. The NEWS entry is below; more detail is in the ChangeLog file in the package.

0.9.1   2011-02-14

    o   A number of internal changes to the memory allocation / protection of
        temporary objects were made---with a heartfelt "Thank You!" to both
        Doug Bates for very persistent debugging of Rcpp modules code, and to
        Luke Tierney who added additional memory allocation debugging tools
        to R-devel (which will be in R 2.13.0 and may also be in R 2.12.2)
        
    o   Removed another GNU Make-specific variable from src/Makevars in order
        to make the build more portable; this was noticed on FreeBSD

    o   On *BSD, do not try to compute a stack trace but provide file and
        line number (which is the same behaviour as implemented in Windows)

    o   Fixed an int conversion bug reported by Daniel Sabanes Bove on r-devel,
        added unit test as well
    
    o   Added unit tests for complex-typed vectors (thanks to Christian Gunning)
    
    o   Expanded the Rcpp-quickref vignette (with thanks to Christian Gunning)

    o   Additional examples were added to the Rcpp-FAQ vignette
Thanks to CRANberries, there is also a diff to the previous release 0.9.0.

As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

/code/rcpp | permanent link