A brand new release 0.1.16 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN, has been built for r2u, and is updated on r-universe.
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.
This version updates to the recent 5.0.2 upstream release with improved performance. Given the strong focus on performance, this release also alters some of the R and C++ interfaces to be more direct. Rcpp generally aims for a balance between readable / maintainable code and good performance; this moves the dial closer to strong performance gains. As Daniel noted in a table in the (main) PR for this release, this now consistently beats yyjsonr, and improves considerably over the previous release of this package. I had made some smaller interim upgrades earlier (without a CRAN releases), and made a number of minor standard packaging updates.
The short NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in version 0.1.16 (2026-10-09)
simdjson was upgraded to versions 4.6.1 and 4.6.3 (Dirk in #100 and #102 fixing #99 and #101)
simdjson was upgraded to version 5.0.2 (Daniel in #104)
A number of small tweaks to the Rcpp interface were made too (Daniel in #104)
Diagnostics for
gccandclangare not suppressed per CRAN Policy (Dirk in #106 closing #105)The continuous integration matrix was extended to
g++version 15 and 16 (Dirk in #108 closing #107)A few minor packaging nags were address (Dirk in #109)
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker 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 now sponsor me at GitHub.