A new release 0.11.4 of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R, and an updated Debian package will be uploaded in due course.
Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 323 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further; BioConductor adds another 41 packages, and casual searches on GitHub suggests dozens mores.
This release once again adds a large number of small bug fixes, polishes and enhancements. And like the last time, these changes were made by a group of seven different contributors (counting code commits) plus three more providing concrete suggestions. This shows that the Rcpp development and maintenance rests a large number of (broad) shoulders.
See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.
Changes in Rcpp version 0.11.4 (2015-01-20)
Changes in Rcpp API:
The
ListOf<T>class gains the.attrand.namesmethods common to other Rcpp vectors.The
[dpq]nbinom_mu()scalar functions are now available via theR::namespace when R 3.1.2 or newer is used.Add an additional test for AIX before attempting to include
execinfo.h.
Rcpp::stopnow supports improvedprintf-like syntax using the small tinyformat header-only library (following a similar implementation in Rcpp11)Pairlist objects are now protected via an additional
Shield<>as suggested by Martin Morgan on the rcpp-devel list.Sorting is now prohibited at compile time for objects of type
List,RawVectorandExpressionVector.Vectors now have a
Vector::const_iteratorthat is 'const correct' thanks to fix by Romain following a bug report in rcpp-devel by Martyn Plummer.The
mean()sugar function now uses a more robust two-pass method, and new unit tests formean()were added at the same time.The
mean()andvar()functions now support all core vector types.The
setequal()sugar function has been corrected via suggestion by Qiang Kou following a bug report by Søren Højsgaard.The macros
major,minor, andmakedevno longer leak in from the (Linux) system headersys/sysmacros.h.The
push_front()string function was corrected.Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
Only look for plugins in the package's namespace (rather than entire search path).
Also scan header files for definitions of functions to be considerd by Attributes.
Correct the regular expression for source files which are scanned.
Changes in Rcpp unit tests
Added a new binary test which will load a pre-built package to ensure that the Application Binary Interface (ABI) did not change; this test will (mostly or) only run at Travis where we have reasonable control over the platform running the test and can provide a binary.
New unit tests for sugar functions
mean,setequalandvarwere added as noted above.Changes in Rcpp Examples:
For the (old) examples
ConvolveBenchmarksandOpenMP, the respectiveMakefilewas renamed toGNUmakefileto pleaseR CMD checkas well as the CRAN Maintainers.
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 page, 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.
A new version of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. This package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp package.
This follows on the heels on the recent RcppGSL 0.2.3 release and extends the excellent point made by Qiang Kou in a contributed section of the vignette: We now not only allow to turn the GSL error handler off (to not abort() on error) but do so on package initialisation.
No other user-facing changes were made.
The NEWS file entries follows below:
Changes in version 0.2.4 (2015-01-24)
Two new helper function to turn the default GSL error handler off (and to restore it) were added. The default handler is now turned off when the package is attached so that GSL will no longer abort an R session on error. Users will have to check the error code.
The
RcppGSL-intro.Rnwvignette was expanded with a short section on the GSL error handler (thanks to Qiang Kou).
Courtesy of CRANberries, a summary of changes to the most recent release is available.
More information is on the RcppGSL page. 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.
A new version of RcppAnnoy is now on CRAN. RcppAnnoy wraps the small, fast, and lightweight C++ template header library Annoy written by Erik Bernhardsson for use at Spotify. RcppAnnoy uses Rcpp Modules to offer the exact same functionality as the Python module wrapped around Annoy.
This version contains a trivial one-character change requested by CRAN to cleanse the Makevars file of possible GNU Make-isms. Oh well. This release also overcomes an undefined behaviour sanitizer bug noticed by CRAN that took somewhat more effort to deal with. As mentioned recently in another blog post, it took some work to create a proper Docker container with the required compiler and subsequent R setup, but we have one now, and the aforementioned blog post has details on how we replicated the CRAN finding of an UBSAN issue. It also took Erik some extra efforts to set something up for his C++/Python side, but eventually an EC2 instance with Ubuntu 14.10 did the task as my Docker sales skills are seemingly not convincing enough. In any event, he very quickly added the right fix, and I synced RcppAnnoy with his Annoy code.
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. More detailed information is on the RcppAnnoy page 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.