Dirk Eddelbuettel

Wed, 07 Nov 2018

Rcpp 1.0.0: The Tenth Birthday Release

As mentioned here two days ago, the Rcpp package turned ten on Monday—and we used to opportunity to mark the current version as 1.0.0! Thanks to everybody who liked and retweeted our tweet about this. And of course, once more a really big Thank You! to everybody who helped along this journey: Rcpp Core team, contributors, bug reporters, workshop and tutorial attendees and last but not least all those users – we did well. So let’s enjoy and celebrate this moment.

As indicated in Monday’s blog post, we had also planned to upload this version to CRAN, and this 1.0.0 release arrived on CRAN after the customary inspection and is now available. I will build the Debian package in a moment, it will find its way to Ubuntu and of the CRAN-mirrored backport that Michael looks after so well.

While this release is of course marked as 1.0.0 signifying the feature and release stability we have had for some time, it also marks another regular release at the now-common bi-monthly schedule following nineteen releases since July 2016 in the 0.12.* series as well as another five in the preceding 0.11.* series.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 1493 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 150 in the (very recent) BioConductor release 3.8. Per the (partial) logs of CRAN downloads, we were reaching more than 900,000 downloads a month of late.

Once again, we have a number of nice pull requests from the usual gang of contributors in there, see below for details.

Changes in Rcpp version 1.0.0 (2018-11-05)

  • Happy tenth birthday to Rcpp, and hello release 1.0 !

  • Changes in Rcpp API:

    • The empty destructor for the Date class was removed to please g++-9 (prerelease) and -Wdeprecated-copy (Dirk).

    • The constructor for NumericMatrix(not_init(n,k)) was corrected (Romain in #904, Dirk in #905, and also Romain in #908 fixing #907).

    • Rcpp::String no longer silently drops embedded NUL bytes in strings but throws new Rcpp exception embedded_nul_in_string. (Kevin in #917 fixing #916).

  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

    • The Dockerfile for Continuous Integration sets the required test flag (for release versions) inside the container (Dirk).

    • Correct the R CMD check call to skip vignettes (Dirk).

  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

    • A new [[Rcpp::init]] attribute allows function registration for running on package initialization (JJ in #903).

    • Sort the files scanned for attributes in the C locale for stable output across systems (JJ in #912).

  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

    • The 'Rcpp Extending' vignette was corrected and refers to EXPOSED rather than EXPORTED (Ralf Stubner in #910).

    • The 'Unit test' vignette is no longer included (Dirk in #914).

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