Dirk Eddelbuettel

Tue, 29 Aug 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.6.3.0 on CRAN: New Upstream Bugfix

armadillo image

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) 1092 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 30.3 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 549 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.6.3. We skipped 12.6.2 at CRAN (as discussed in the previous release notes) as it only affected Armadillo-internal random-number generation (RNG). As we default to supplying the RNGs from R, this did not affect RcppArmadillo. The bug fixes in 12.6.3 are for csv reading which too will most likely be done by R tools for R users, but given two minor bugfix releases an update was in order. I ran the full reverse-depenency check against the now more than 1000 packages overnight: no issues. armadillo processing CRAN processed the package fully automatically as it has no issues, and nothing popped up in reverse-dependency checking.

The set of changes for the last two RcppArmadillo releases follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.3.0 (2023-08-28)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.3 (Cortisol Retox)

    • Fix for corner-case in loading CSV files with headers

    • For consistent file handling, all .load() functions now open text files in binary mode

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.2.0 (2023-08-08)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.2 (Cortisol Retox)

    • use thread-safe Mersenne Twister as the default RNG on all platforms

    • use unique RNG seed for each thread within multi-threaded execution (such as OpenMP)

    • explicitly document arma_rng::set_seed() and arma_rng::set_seed_random()

  • None of the changes above affect R use as RcppArmadillo connects the RNGs used by R to Armadillo

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 Rcpp 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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