A new version of digest is just now arriving at CRAN (following a slight holdup over one likely spurious reverse dependency error), and I will send an updated package to Debian shortly as well.
digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, and spookyhash algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a fairly widely-used package (currently listed at 795k downloads) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation.
Every now and then open source work really surprises you. Out of nowhere arrived a very fine pull request by Matthew de Queljoe which adds a very clever function getVDigest() supplying a (much faster) vectorized wrapper for digest creation. We illustrate this in a quick demo vectorized.R that is included too. So if you call digest() in bulk, this will most likely be rather helpful to you. Matthew even did further cleanups and refactorings but we are saving that for a subsequent pull request or two.
CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version.
For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.