Thu, 13 Jan 2022

Rcpp 1.0.8: Updated, Strict Headers

The Rcpp team is thrilled to share the news of the newest release 1.0.8 of Rcpp which hit CRAN today, and has already been uploaded to Debian as well. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days. This release continues with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, interim ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases will alwasys be available in the Rcpp drat repo; this cycle there were once again seven (!!) – times two as we also tested the modified header (more below). These rolling release tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, around 2478 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 242 in BioConductor.

This release finally brings a change we have worked on quite a bit over the last few months. The idea of enforcing the setting of STRICT_R_HEADERS was prososed years ago in 2016 and again in 2018. But making such a chance against a widely-deployed code base has repurcussions, and we were not ready then. Last April, this was revisited in issue #1158. Over the course of numerous lengthy runs of tests of a changed Rcpp package against (essentially) all reverse-dependencies (i.e. packages which use Rcpp) we identified ninetyfour packages in total which needed a change. We provided either a patch we emailed, or a GitHub pull request, to all ninetyfour. And we are happy to say that eighty cases were resolved via a new CRAN upload, with a seven more having merged the pull request but not yet uploaded.

Hence, we could make the case to CRAN (who were always CC’ed on the monthly ‘nag’ emails we sent to maintainers of packages needing a change) that an upload was warranted. And after a brief period for their checks and inspection, our January 11 release of Rcpp 1.0.8 arrived on CRAN on January 13.

So with that, a big and heartfelt Thank You! to all eighty maintainers for updating their packages to permit this change at the Rcpp end, to CRAN for the extra checking, and to everybody else who I bugged with the numerous emails and updated to the seemingly never-ending issue #1158. We all got this done, and that is a Good Thing (TM).

Other than the aforementioned change which will not automatically set STRICT_R_HEADERS (unless opted out which one can), a number of nice pull request by a number of contributors are included in this release:

• Iñaki generalized use of finalizers for external pointers in #1180
• Kevin ensured include paths are always quoted in #1189
• Dirk added new headers to allow a more fine-grained choice of Rcpp feature for faster builds in #1191
• Travers Ching extended the function signature generator to allow for a default R argument in #1184 and #1187
• Dirk extended documentation, removed old example code, updated references and refreshed CI setup in several PRs (see below)

The full list of details follows.

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.8 (2022-01-11)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • STRICT_R_HEADERS is now enabled by default, see extensive discussion in #1158 closing #898.

  • A new #define allows default setting of finalizer calls for external pointers (Iñaki in #1180 closing #1108).

  • Rcpp:::CxxFlags() now quotes the include path generated, (Kevin in #1189 closing #1188).

  • New header files Rcpp/Light, Rcpp/Lighter, Rcpp/Lightest and default Rcpp/Rcpp for fine-grained access to features (and compilation time) (Dirk #1191 addressing #1168).

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • A new option signature allows customization of function signatures (Travers Ching in #1184 and #1187 fixing #1182)

• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

  • The Rcpp FAQ has a new entry on how not to grow a vector (Dirk in #1167).

  • Some long-spurious calls to RNGSope have been removed from examples (Dirk in #1173 closing #1172).

  • DOI reference in the bibtex files have been updated per JSS request (Dirk in #1186).

• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

  • Some continuous integration components have been updated (Dirk in #1174, #1181, and #1190).

Thanks to my 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. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2822 previous questions.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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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