Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sat, 26 Mar 2016

Rcpp 0.12.4: And another one

The fourth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp has now arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R, and has just been pushed to Debian as well. This follows four days of idleness in the incoming/ directory: Word is that the tireless CRAN maintainers were traveling and only covering simpler packages. The 0.12.4 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, and the 0.12.3 release in January -- making it the eight release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. As before, this release is more of a maintenance release addressing a number of small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 615 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by more than sixty packages from the last release in January!

As during the last few releases, we have new first-time contributors. Kirill Mueller extended Nullable<> to const objects. James "coatless" Balamuta helped with a much-needed update to the Rcpp FAQ concerning recommendations for OS X installations. Colin Gillespie corrected another (small) vignette issue. Contributions from the rest of the gang as well as by-now regular contributors such as Nathan or Dan are detailed below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.4 (2016-03-22)

  • Changes in Rcpp API:

    • New accessors as() and clone() were added to the Nullable class (Dan in PR #423 closing #421)

    • The Nullable<>::operator SEXP() and Nullable<>::get() now also work for const objects (Kirill Mueller in PR #417).

    • A subsetting error was fixed (Qiang via #432 closing #431).

  • Changes in Rcpp Sugar:

    • Added new Sugar function median() (Nathan in PR #425 closing #424)

    • Added new Sugar function cbind() (Nathan in PR #447 closing #407)

  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

    • A plugin for C++14 was added (Dan in PR #427)

  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

    • An entry was added to the Rcpp-FAQ vignette describing the required packages for vignette building (#422).

    • Use on OS X was further detailed (James Balamuta in #433 with further review by Bob Rudis).

    • An entry was added concerning the hard-code limit of arguments to some constructor and function (cf #435).

    • The Rcpp-FAQ vignette now contains a table of content.

    • Typos and indentation were corrected in the Rcpp Sugar vignette (#445 by Colin Gillespie).

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.

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