Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sun, 15 Nov 2015

Rcpp 0.12.2: More refinements

The second update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R. As usual, I will also push a Debian package. This follows the 0.12.0 release from late July which started to add some serious new features, and builds upon the 0.12.1 release in September. It also marks the sixth release this year where we managed to keep a steady bi-montly release frequency.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 512 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by more than fifty package from the last release in September (and we recently blogged about crossing 500 dependents).

This release once again features pull requests from two new contributors with Nathan Russell and Tianqi Chen joining in. As shown below, other recent contributors (such as such as Dan) are keeping at it too. Keep'em coming! Luke Tierney also email about a code smell he spotted and which we took care of. A big Thank You! to everybody helping with code, bug reports or documentation. See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.2 (2015-11-14)

  • Changes in Rcpp API:

    • Correct return type in product of matrix dimensions (PR #374 by Florian)

    • Before creating a single String object from a SEXP, ensure that it is from a vector of length one (PR #376 by Dirk, fixing #375).

    • No longer use STRING_ELT as a left-hand side, thanks to a heads-up by Luke Tierney (PR #378 by Dirk, fixing #377).

    • Rcpp Module objects are now checked more carefully (PR #381 by Tianqi, fixing #380)

    • An overflow in Matrix column indexing was corrected (PR #390 by Qiang, fixing a bug reported by Allessandro on the list)

    • Nullable types can now be assigned R_NilValue in function signatures. (PR #395 by Dan, fixing issue #394)

    • operator<<() now always shows decimal points (PR #396 by Dan)

    • Matrix classes now have a transpose() function (PR #397 by Dirk fixing #383)

    • operator<<() for complex types was added (PRs #398 by Qiang and #399 by Dirk, fixing #187)

  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

    • Enable export of C++ interface for functions that return void.

  • Changes in Rcpp Sugar:

    • Added new Sugar function cummin(), cummax(), cumprod() (PR #389 by Nathan Russell fixing #388)

    • Enabled sugar math operations for subsets; e.g. x[y] + x[z]. (PR #393 by Kevin and Qiang, implementing #392)

  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

    • The NEWS file now links to GitHub issue tickets and pull requests.

    • The Rcpp.bib file with bibliographic references was updated.

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.

/code/rcpp | permanent link