Fri, 14 Mar 2014

Rcpp 0.11.1

A new minor release 0.11.1 of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R; binaries for Debian have also been uploaded.

The release fixes a number of bugs that have come up since the 0.11.0 release in January, but also brings some extensions. See the NEWS file section below for details, or the ChangeLog file in the package and on the Rcpp Changelog page

Once again, we tested this release by building against all CRAN packages which depend upon Rcpp. In short, three packages are blacklisted from tests, and three came up with something we noted --- but the remaining 177 packages all build and test cleanly. Detailed results of those tests (and the scripts for it) are on GitHub.

There are a number of other fixes, upgrades and other extensions detailed in NEWS file extract below, in the ChangeLog file in the package and on the Rcpp Changelog page.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.11.1 (2014-03-13)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • Preserve backwards compatibility with Rcpp 0.10.* by allowing RObject extraction from vectors (or lists) of Rcpp objects

  • Add missing default constructor to Reference class that was omitted in the header-only rewrite

  • Fixes for NA and NaN handling of the IndexHash class, as well as the vector .sort() method. These fixes ensure that sugar functions depending on IndexHash (i.e. unique(), sort_unique(), match()) will now properly handle NA and NaN values for numeric vectors.

  • DataFrame::nrows now more accurately mimics R's internal behavior (checks the row.names attribute)

  • Numerous changes to permit compilation on the Solaris OS

  • Rcpp vectors gain a subsetting method – it is now possible to subset an Rcpp vector using CharacterVectors (subset a by name), LogicalVectors (logical subsetting), and IntegerVectors (0-based index subsetting). Such subsetting will also work with Rcpp sugar expressions, enabling expressions such as x[ x > 0].

  • Comma initialization (e.g. CharacterVector x = "a", "b", "c";, has been disabled, as it causes problems with the behavior of the = operator with Rcpp::Lists. Users who want to re-enable this functionality can use #define RCPP_COMMA_INITIALIZATION, but be aware of the above caveat. The more verbose CharacterVector x = CharacterVector::create("a", "b", "c") is preferred.

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes

  • Fix issue preventing packages with Rcpp::interfaces attribute from compiling.

  • Fix behavior with attributes parsing of ::create for default arguments, and also allow constructors of a given size (e.g. NumericVector v = NumericVector(10)) gives a default value of numeric(10) at the R level). Also make NAs preserve type when exported to R (e.g. NA_STRING as a default argument maps to NA_character_ at the R level)

• Changes in Rcpp modules

  • Corrected the un_pointer implementation for object

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. 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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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