Tue, 25 Mar 2025

crc32c 0.0.3 on CRAN: Accommodate Unreleased (!!) cmake Version

A third release of the crc32c package is now on CRAN. The package bring the Google library crc32c to R and offers cyclical checksums with parity in hardware-accelerated form on (recent enough) intel cpus as well as on arm64.

This release is one hundred percent maintenance. Brian Ripley reached out as he already tests the (still very much unreleased) cmake 4.0.0 release, currently at rc5. And that version is now picky about minimum cmake version statements in CMakeLists.txt. As we copied the upstream one here, with its setting of the jurassic 3.1 version, our build conked out. A simple switch to 3.5..4.0, declaring a ‘from .. to’ scheme with a minimally supported version (here 3.5, released in 2016) up to a tested version works. No other changes, really, besides an earlier helping hand from Jeroen concerning cross-compilation support he needed or encountered (and that happened right after the 0.0.2 release).

The NEWS entry for this (as well the initial release) follows.

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2025-03-25)

• Support cross-compilation by setting CC and CXX in Makevars.in (Jeroen Ooms in #1)

• Support pre-release 4.0.0 of cmake by moving the minimum stated version from 3.1 to 3.5 per CRAN request, also sent PR upstream

My CRANberries service provides a comparison to the previous release. The code is available via the GitHub repo, and of course also from its CRAN page and via install.packages("crc32c"). Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/crc32c | permanent link

littler 0.3.21 on CRAN: Lots Moar Features!

The twentysecond release of littler as a CRAN package landed on CRAN just now, following in the now nineteen year history (!!) as a (initially non-CRAN) package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only began to do in recent years.

littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to some-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default were a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet – the build system could be extended – see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH. A few examples are highlighted at the Github repo:, as well as in the examples vignette.

This release, the first is almost exactly one year, brings enhancements to six scripts as well as three new ones. The new ones crup.r offers ‘CRan UPloads’ from the command-line, deadliners.r lists CRAN package by CRAN deadline, and wb.r uploads to win-builder (replacing an older shell script of mine). Among the updated ones, kitten.r now creates more complete DESCRIPTION files in the packages it makes, and several scripts support additional options. A number of changes were made to packaging as well, some of which were contributed by Jon and Michael which is of course always greatly appreciated. The trigger for the release was, just like for RQuantLib earlier today, a CRAN nag on ‘bashisms’ half of which actually false here it was in a comment only. Oh well.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.21 (2025-03-24)

• Changes in examples scripts

  • Usage text for ciw.r is improved, new options were added (Dirk)

  • The ‘noble’ release is supported by r2u.r (Dirk)

  • The installRub.r script has additional options (Dirk)

  • The ttlt.r script has a new load_package argument (Dirk)

  • A new script deadliners.r showing CRAN packages 'under deadline' has been added, and then refined (Dirk)

  • The kitten.r script can now use whoami and argument githubuser on the different *kitten helpers it calls (Dirk)

  • A new script wb.r can upload to win-builder (Dirk)

  • A new script crup.r can upload a CRAN submission (Dirk)

  • In rcc.r, the return from rcmdcheck is now explicitly printed (Dirk)

  • In r2u.r the dry-run option is passed to the build command (Dirk)

• Changes in package

  • Regular updates to badges, continuous integration, DESCRIPTION and configure.ac (Dirk)

  • Errant osVersion return value are handled more robustly (Michael Chirico in #121)

  • The current run-time path is available via variable LITTLER_SCRIPT_PATH (Jon Clayden in #122)

  • The cleanup script remove macOS debug symbols (Jon Clayden in #123)

My CRANberries service provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page, and also on the package docs website. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs and now of course also from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). Binary packages are available directly in Debian as well as (in a day or two) Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter. Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/littler | permanent link

RQuantLib 0.4.25 on CRAN: Fix Bashism in Configure

A new minor release 0.4.25 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN this morning, and has just now been uploaded to Debian too.

QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for nearly twenty-two years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded to CRAN.

This release of RQuantLib is tickled by a request to remove ‘bashisms’ in shell scripts, or, as in my case here, configure.ac where I used the non-portable form of string comparison. That has of course been there for umpteen years and not bitten anyone as the default shell for most is in fact bash but the change has the right idea. And is of course now mandatory affecting quite a few packages is I tooted yesterday. It also contains an improvement to the macOS 14 build kindly contributed by Jeroen.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.25 (2025-03-24)

• Support macOS 14 with a new compiler flag (Jeroen in #190)

• Correct two bashisms in configure.ac

One more note, though: This may however be the last release I make with Windows support. CRAN now also checks for ‘forbidden’ symbols (such as assert or (s)printf or …) in static libraries, and this release tickled one such warning from the Windows side (which only uses static libraries). I have no desire to get involved in also maintaing QuantLib (no R here) for Windows and may simply turn the package back to OS_type: unix to avoid the hassle. To avoid that, it would be fabulous if someone relying on RQuantLib on Windows could step up and lend a hand looking after that library build.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now 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.

/code/rquantlib | permanent link