Wed, 22 Feb 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.0.1.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, New Features

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1042 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 28.1 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 513 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings a new upstream release 12.0.1. We found a small regression with the 12.0.0 release when we tested prior to a CRAN upload. Conrad very promptly fixed this with a literal one liner and made it 12.0.1 which we wrapped up as 0.12.0.1.0. Subsequent testing revealed no issues for us, and CRAN autoprocessed it as I tweeted earlier. This is actually quite impressive given the over 1000 CRAN packages using it all of which got tested again by CRAN. All this is testament to the rigour, as well as the well-oiled process at the repository. Our thanks go to the tireless maintainers!

The releases actually has a rather nice set of changes (detailed below) to which we added one robustification thanks to Kevin.

The full set of changes follows. We include the previous changeset as we may have skipped the usual blog post here.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.0.1.0 (2023-02-20)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.0.1 (Cortisol Profusion)

  • faster fft() and ifft() via optional use of FFTW3

  • faster min() and max()

  • faster index_min() and index_max()

  • added .col_as_mat() and .row_as_mat() which return matrix representation of cube column and cube row

  • added csv_opts::strict option to loading CSV files to interpret missing values as NaN

  • added check_for_zeros option to form 4 of sparse matrix batch constructors

  • inv() and inv_sympd() with options inv_opts::no_ugly or inv_opts::allow_approx now use a scaled threshold similar to pinv()

  • set_cout_stream() and set_cerr_stream() are now no-ops; instead use the options ARMA_WARN_LEVEL, or ARMA_COUT_STREAM, or ARMA_CERR_STREAM

  • fix regression (mis-compilation) in shift() function (reported by us in #409)

• The include directory order is now more robust (Kevin Ushey in #407 addressing #406)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.4.0 (2023-02-09)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.4 (Ship of Theseus)

  • extended pow() with various forms of element-wise power operations

  • added find_nan() to find indices of NaN elements

  • faster handling of compound expressions by sum()

• The package no longer sets a compilation standard, or progagates on in the generated packages as R ensures C++11 on all non-ancient versions

• The CITATION file was updated to the current format

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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