Sat, 07 Dec 2019

RcppArmadillo 0.9.800.3.0

armadillo image

A small Armadillo bugfix upstream update 9.800.3 came out a few days ago. The changes, summarised by Conrad in email to me (and for once not yet on the arma site are fixes for matrix row iterators, better detection of non-hermitian matrices by eig_sym(), inv_sympd(), chol(), expmat_sym() and miscellaneous minor fixes. It also contains a bug fix by Christian Gunning to his sample() implementation.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 679 other packages on CRAN.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.800.3.0 (2019-12-04)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.800.3 (Horizon Scraper)

  • The sample function passes the prob vector as const allowing subsequent calls (Christian Gunning in #276 fixing #275)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

RDieHarder 0.2.1

A new version, now at 0.2.1, of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself) is now on CRAN.

This version has only internal changes. Brian Ripley, tireless as always, is testing the impact of gcc 10 on CRAN code and found that the ‘to-be-default’ option -fno-common throws off a few (older) C code bases, this one (which is indeed old) included. So in a nutshell, we declared all global variables extern and defined them once and only once in new file globals.c. Needless to say, this affects the buildability options. In the past we used to rely on an external library libdieharder (which e.g. I had put together for Debian) but we now just build everything internally in the package.

Which builds on the changes in RDieHarder 0.2.0 which I apparently had not blogged about when it came out on December 21 last year. I had refactored the package to use either the until-then-required-but-now-optional external library, or the included library code. Doing so meant more builds on more systems including Windows.

This (very old) package has no NEWS.Rd file to take a summary from, but the ChangeLog file has all the details.

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff from 0.2.1 to 0.2.0. or the older diff from 0.2.0 to 0.1.4.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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/rdieharder | permanent link