Thu, 24 Sep 2026

RcppFastAD 0.0.5 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new release 0.0.5 of the RcppFastAD package is now on CRAN, has been built for r2u, and updated at r-universe. This comes (to the day) two years after the preceding 0.0.4 release.

RcppFastAD wraps the FastAD header-only C++ library by James which provides a C++ implementation of both forward and reverse mode of automatic differentiation. It offers an easy-to-use header library that is both lightweight and performant. With a little of bit of Rcpp glue, it is also easy to use from R in simple C++ applications. This release updates the continuous integration setup as one does, adds a local configuration helper to quieten compilation (described also in this blog post). It also adds a defensive setting for g++: Under recent g++ versions and optimisation at least the -O3 level, segfaults are seen as something is not quite right with (temporary) “views” of Eigen objects in code generated by this versions. Others are fine, as is clang++. We have not gotten to the bottom of it, but setting -g0 seems to ensure that builds generally work.

The NEWS file for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.0.5 (2026-09-24)

  • Several routine updates to continuous integration have been made

  • Local builds (where a .git/ directory is seen) now append silencing compiler option that CRAN would object to

  • Given recent issues with g++ under optimization, debugging is turned off by default.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

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 now sponsor me at GitHub.

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