Tue, 20 Oct 2020

RcppArmadillo 0.10.1.0.0

armadillo image

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) 786 other packages on CRAN.

A little while ago, Conrad released version 10.1.0 of Armadillo, a a new major release. As before, given his initial heads-up we ran two full reverse-depends checks, and as a consequence contacted four packages authors (two by email, two via PR) about a miniscule required change (as Armadillo now defaults to C++11, an old existing setting of avoiding C++11 lead to an error). Our thanks to those who promptly update their packages—truly appreciated. As it turns out, Conrad also softened the error by the time the release ran around.

But despite our best efforts, the release was delayed considerably by CRAN. We had made several Windows test builds but luck had it that on the uploaded package CRAN got itself a (completely spurious segfault—which can happen on a busy machine building machine things at once). Sadly it took three or four days for CRAN to reply our email. After which it took another number of days for them to ponder the behaviour of a few new ‘deprecated’ messaged tickled by at the most ten or so (out of 786) packages. Oh well. So here we are, eleven days after I emailed the rcpp-devel list about the new package being on CRAN but possibly delayed (due to that seg.fault). But during all that time the package was of course available via the Rcpp drat.

The changes in this release are summarized below as usual and are mostly upstream along with an improved Travis CI setup due to the aforementioned use of the bspm package for binaries at Travis.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.10.1.0.0 (2020-10-09)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 10.1.0 (Orchid Ambush)

    • C++11 is now the minimum required C++ standard

    • faster handling of compound expressions by trimatu() and trimatl()

    • faster sparse matrix addition, subtraction and element-wise multiplication

    • expanded sparse submatrix views to handle the non-contiguous form of X.cols(vector_of_column_indices)

    • expanded eigs_sym() and eigs_gen() with optional fine-grained parameters (subspace dimension, number of iterations, eigenvalues closest to specified value)

    • deprecated form of reshape() removed from Cube and SpMat classes

    • ignore and warn on use of the ARMA_DONT_USE_CXX11 macro

  • Switch Travis CI testing to focal and BSPM

Courtesy of my 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.

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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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