Dirk Eddelbuettel

Mon, 11 Nov 2024

RcppSpdlog 0.0.19 on CRAN: New Upstream, New Features

Version 0.0.19 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN early this morning and has been uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This releases updates the code to the version 1.15.0 of spdlog which was released on Saturday, and contains fmt 11.0.2. It also contains a contributed PR which allows use std::format under C++20, bypassing fmt (with some post-merge polish too), and another PR correcting a documentation double-entry.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.19 (2024-11-10)

  • Support use of std::format under C++20 via opt-in define instead of fmt (Xanthos Xanthopoulos in #19)

  • An erroneous duplicate log=level documentation level was removed (Contantinos Giachalis in #20)

  • Upgraded to upstream release spdlog 1.15.0 (Dirk in #21)

  • Partially revert / simplify src/formatter.cpp accomodating both #19 and previous state (Dirk in #21)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sat, 02 Nov 2024

Rcpp 1.0.13-1 on CRAN: Hot Fix

rcpp logo

A hot-fix release 1.0.13-1, consisting of two small PRs relative to the last regular CRAN release 1.0.13, just arrived on CRAN. When we prepared 1.0.13, we included a change related to the ‘tightening’ of the C API of R itself. Sadly, we pinned an expected change to ‘comes with next (minor) release 4.4.2’ rather than now ‘next (normal aka major) release 4.5.0’. And now that R 4.4.2 is out (as of two days ago) we accidentally broke building against the header file with that check. Whoops. Bugs happen, and we are truly sorry—but this is now addressed in 1.0.13-1.

The normal (bi-annual) release cycle will resume with 1.0.14 slated for January. As you can see from the NEWS file of the development branch, we have a number of changes coming. You can safely access that release candidate version, either off the default branch at github or via r-universe artifacts.

The list below details all changes, as usual. The only other change concerns the now-mandatory use of Authors@R.

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.13-1 (2024-11-01)

  • Changes in Rcpp API:

    • Use read-only VECTOR_PTR and STRING_PTR only with with R 4.5.0 or later (Kevin in #1342 fixing #1341)

  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

    • Authors@R is now used in DESCRIPTION as mandated by CRAN

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues).

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Mon, 14 Oct 2024

RcppDate 0.0.4: New Upstream Minor

RcppDate wraps the featureful date library written by Howard Hinnant for use with R. This header-only modern C++ library has been in pretty wide-spread use for a while now, and adds to C++11/C++14/C++17 what will be (with minor modifications) the ‘date’ library in C++20.

This release, the first in 3 1/2 years, syncs the code with the recent date 3.0.2 release from a few days ago. It also updates a few packaging details such as URLs, badges or continuous integration.

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2024-10-14)

  • Updated to upstream version 3.0.2 (and adjusting one pragma)

  • Several small updates to overall packaging and testing

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 24 Sep 2024

RcppFastAD 0.0.4 on CRAN: Updated Again

A new release 0.0.4 of the RcppFastAD package by James Yang and myself is now on CRAN.

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 (which we wrapped here) 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 quick fix in release 0.0.3 from a good week ago. James took a good look and properly disambiguated the statement that lead clang to complain, so we are back to compiling as C++17 under all compilers which makes for a slightly wider reach.

The NEWS file for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2024-09-24)

  • The package now properly addresses a clang warning on empty variadic macros arguments and is back to C++17 (James in #10)

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 15 Sep 2024

RcppFastAD 0.0.3 on CRAN: Updated

A new release 0.0.3 of the RcppFastAD package by James Yang and myself is now on CRAN.

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 (which we wrapped here) 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 turns compilation to the C++20 standard as newer clang++ versions complained about a particular statement (it took to be C++20) when compiled under C++17. So we obliged.

The NEWS file for these two initial releases follows.

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2024-09-15)

  • The package now compiles under the C++20 standard to avoid a warning under clang++-18 (Dirk addressing #9)

  • Minor updates to continuous integration and badges have been made as well

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Thu, 12 Sep 2024

RcppArmadillo 14.0.2-1 on CRAN: Updates

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) 1164 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 36.1 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 595 times according to Google Scholar.

Conrad released two small incremental releases to version 14.0.0. We did not immediately bring these to CRAN as we have to be mindful of the desired upload cadence of ‘once every one or two months’. But as 14.0.2 has been stable for a few weeks, we now decided to bring it to CRAN. Changes since the last CRAN release are summarised below, and overall fairly minimal. On the package side, we reorder what citation() returns, and now follow CRAN requirements via Authors@R.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.0.2-1 (2024-09-11)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.0.2 (Stochastic Parrot)

    • Optionally use C++20 memory alignment

    • Minor corrections for several corner-cases

  • The order of items displayed by citation() is reversed (Conrad in #449)

  • The DESCRIPTION file now uses an Authors@R field with ORCID IDs

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 10 Sep 2024

RcppSpdlog 0.0.18 on CRAN: Updates

Version 0.0.18 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN today and has been uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This releases updates the code to the version 1.14.1 of spdlog which was released as an incremental fix to 1.14.0, and adds the ability to set log levels via the environment variable SPDLOG_LEVEL.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.18 (2024-09-10)

  • Upgraded to upstream release spdlog 1.14.1

  • Minor packaging upgrades

  • Allow logging levels to be set via environment variable SPDLOG_LEVEL

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 03 Sep 2024

RcppCNPy 0.2.13 on CRAN: Micro Bugfix

Another (again somewhat minor) maintenance release of the RcppCNPy package arrived on CRAN earlier today.

RcppCNPy provides R with read and write access to NumPy files thanks to the cnpy library by Carl Rogers along with Rcpp for the glue to R.

A change in the most recent Rcpp appears to cause void functions wrapper via Rcpp Modules to return NULL, as opposed to being silent. That tickles discrepancy between the current output and the saved (reference) output of one test file, leading CRAN to display a NOTE which we were asked to take care of. Done here in this release—and now that we know we will also look into restoring the prior Rcpp behaviour. Other small changes involved standard maintenance for continuous integration and updates to files README.md and DESCRIPTION. More details are below.

Changes in version 0.2.13 (2024-09-03)

  • A test script was updated to account for the fact that it now returns a few instances of NULL under current Rcpp.

  • Small package maintenance updates have been made to the README and DESCRIPTION files as well as to the continuous integration setup.

CRANberries also provides a diffstat report for the latest release. As always, feedback is welcome and the best place to start a discussion may be the GitHub issue tickets page.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Sat, 24 Aug 2024

RcppEigen 0.3.4.0.2 on CRAN: Micro Maintenance

A new maintenance release of RcppEigen is now on CRAN, and will go to Debian shortly as usual. Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms. RcppEigen is used by 460 other CRAN packages, and has been downloaded 31.9 million times just off the mirrors of CRAN keeping logs for counting.

The recent change switing to Authors@R (now that CRAN mandates it) contained in dual typo in ORCID tags, this releases fixes it.

The complete NEWS file entry follows.

Changes in RcppEigen version 0.3.4.0.2 (2024-08-23)

  • Correct two typos in the ORCID tag

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 20 Aug 2024

RcppMagicEnum 0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package!

Happy to announce a new package: RcppMagicEnum. It arrived on CRAN yesterday following the resumption of normal service following the CRAN summer break. RcppMagicEnum brings the magicenum library by Daniil Goncharov to R.

Modern C++ is powerful, but still lacks reflection. This may change with C++26 but until then this library can help. A simple example, also shown on the README is as follows (and can be called from R via Rcpp::sourceCpp() if the RcppMagicEnum package is installed):

// [[Rcpp::depends(RcppMagicEnum)]]

#include <RcppMagicEnum>

// define a simple enum class, it uses optional typing as well as optional assigned values
enum class Color : int { RED = -10, BLUE = 0, GREEN = 10 };

// [[Rcpp::export]]
void example() {
    // instantiate an enum value in variable 'val'
    auto val = Color::RED;

    // show the current value on stdout
    Rcpp::Rcout << "Name of enum: " << magic_enum::enum_name(val) << std::endl;
    Rcpp::Rcout << "Integer value of enum: " << magic_enum::enum_integer(val) << std::endl;
}

/*** R
example()
*/

It produces the following output (where the ‘meta-comment’ at the end ensure the included and created-by-sourcing function example() is also called):

> Rcpp::sourceCpp("miniex.cpp")

> example()
Name of enum: RED
Integer value of enum: -10
>

The plan to experiment some more with this and then see if we could possible make factor variables map to such enums and vice versa. Help and discussion input is always welcome, and could be submitted either on the rcpp-devel list or as an issue at the repo.

The short NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2024-07-31)

  • Initial version and CRAN upload

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Fri, 16 Aug 2024

RcppEigen 0.3.4.0.1 on CRAN: Minor Maintenance

A new maintenance release of RcppEigen is now on CRAN, and will go to Debian shortly as usual. Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms.

A very recent change in the development version of R (aka “r-devel”) expanded the set of declared BLAS and LAPACK functions (and I tooted approvingly about it as well). It turns out that the xerbla() declaration there (which, as usual for R and as discussed in Writing R Extensions, defines the new optional character length entry for a char vector) conflicts with one in the blas.h header in Eigen upsetting the compilation of just one reverse-dependency. So CRAN, as they so often (and quietly) do in these cases, gave us a friendly and concise heads-up and asked for a change so we complied, did the usual reverse-dependency check of the other 400+ packages using RcppEigen and produced the new release which was injected into the repository during the current summer break.

The complete NEWS file entry follows.

Changes in RcppEigen version 0.3.4.0.1 (2024-08-14)

  • Conditionally comment-out xerbla in blas.h as it is now providedd by R-devel albeit with FC_LEN_T (per a CRAN request)

  • Minor package updates (continuous integration, badges)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 17 Jul 2024

Rcpp 1.0.13 on CRAN: Some Updates

rcpp logo

The Rcpp Core Team is once again pleased to announce a new release (now at 1.0.13) of the Rcpp package. It arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has since been uploaded to Debian. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution–and of course r2u should catch up tomorrow too. The release was uploaded last week, but not only does Rcpp always gets flagged because of the grandfathered .Call(symbol) but CRAN also found two packages ‘regressing’ which then required them to take five days to get back to us. One issue was known; another did not reproduce under our tests against over 2800 reverse dependencies leading to the eventual release today. Yay. Checks are good and appreciated, and it does take time by humans to review them.

This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases available via the Rcpp drat repo as well as the r-universe page and repo and strongly encourage their use and testing—I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies.

Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2867 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 256 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.6% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.9% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 86.3 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1848 (JSS, 2011) and 324 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 641.

This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards. The move towards a more standardized approach for the C API of R leads to a few changes; Kevin did most of the PRs for this. Andrew Johnsom also provided a very nice PR to update internals taking advantage of variadic templates.

The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.13 (2024-07-11)

  • Changes in Rcpp API:

    • Set R_NO_REMAP if not already defined (Dirk in #1296)

    • Add variadic templates to be used instead of generated code (Andrew Johnson in #1303)

    • Count variables were switches to size_t to avoid warnings about conversion-narrowing (Dirk in #1307)

    • Rcpp now avoids the usage of the (non-API) DATAPTR function when accessing the contents of Rcpp Vector objects where possible. (Kevin in #1310)

    • Rcpp now emits an R warning on out-of-bounds Vector accesses. This may become an error in a future Rcpp release. (Kevin in #1310)

    • Switch VECTOR_PTR and STRING_PTR to new API-compliant RO variants (Kevin in #1317 fixing #1316)

  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

    • Small updates to the CI test containers have been made (#1304)

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues).

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Mon, 08 Jul 2024

RcppArmadillo 14.0.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream

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) 1158 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 35.1 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 587 times according to Google Scholar.

Conrad released a new major upstream version 14.0.0 a couple of days ago. We had been testing this new version extensively over several rounds of reverse-dependency checks across all 1100+ packages. This revealed nine packages requiring truly minor adjustments—which eight maintainers made in a matter of days; all this was coordinated in issue #443. Following the upload, CRAN noticed one more issue (see issue #446) but this turned out to be local to the package. There are also renewed deprecation warnings with some Armadillo changes which we will need to address one-by-one. Last but not least with this release we also changed the package versioning scheme to follow upstream Armadillo more closely.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.0.0-1 (2024-07-05)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.0.0 (Stochastic Parrot)

    • C++14 is now the minimum recommended C++ standard

    • Faster handling of compound expressions by as_scalar(), accu(), dot()

    • Faster interactions between sparse and dense matrices

    • Expanded stddev() to handle sparse matrices

    • Expanded relational operators to handle expressions between sparse matrices and scalars

    • Added .as_dense() to obtain dense vector/matrix representation of any sparse matrix expression

    • Updated physical constants to NIST 2022 CODATA values

  • New package version numbering scheme following upstream versions

  • Re-enabling ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKE for silent CRAN builds

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 07 Jul 2024

RcppSimdJson 0.1.12 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new maintenance release 0.1.12 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN.

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 release responds to another CRAN request, this time to accomodate compilation under C++20 with g++-14. As this was alreadt addressed upstream in simdjson it was simply a matter of upgrading to the current upstream which Daniel did in a PR.

The (once again very short) NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.12 (2024-07-05)

  • Updated benchmarks now include 'yyjsonr'

  • simdjson was upgraded to version 3.95 (Daniel in #92 fixing #91)

  • Additional small update for C++20 compilation under g++-14

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.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Fri, 31 May 2024

RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.4.0 on CRAN: 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) 1151 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 34.6 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 584 times according to Google Scholar.

Conrad released a new upstream bugfix yesterday (to improve views of sparse matrices). We uploaded it yesterday too but it once agfain took a day for the hard-working CRAN maintainers to concur that the two NOTEs from reverse-dependency checking over 1100 packages were in a fact false positves. And so it appeared on CRAN earlier today. We also increased the versioned dependency on Rcpp to match the use of optional entry-point headers Rcpp/Light, Rcpp/Lighter and Rcpp/Lightest. No other changes were made.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.4.0 (2024-05-30)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.4 (Cortisol Injector)

    • Faster handling of sparse submatrix views

  • Update versioned Depends on Rcpp to 1.0.8 or later to match use of Light/Lighter/Lightest headers.

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 08 May 2024

RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.3.0 on CRAN: 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) 1144 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 34.2 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 583 times according to Google Scholar.

Conrad released a new upstream bugfix yesterday (for a corner case with fftw3). We uploaded it yesterday too but it took a day for the hard-working CRAN maintainers to concur that the one (!) NOTE from reverse-dependency checking over 1100 packages was in a fact a false positve. And so it appeared on CRAN (very) early this morning. We also made a change removing a long-redundant setter for C++11 mode via the plugin. No other changes were made.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.3.0 (2024-05-07)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.3 (Cortisol Injector)

    • Fix issue in fft() and fft2() in multi-threaded contexts with FFTW3 enabled

  • No longer set C++11 for the Rcpp plugin as this standard has been the default by R for very long time now.

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 01 May 2024

RcppInt64 0.0.5 on CRAN: Minor Maintenance

The new-ish package RcppInt64 (announced last fall in this post, with three small updates following) arrived on CRAN yesterday as relase 0.0.5. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package. It offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions ‘from’ and ‘to’.

This release addresses an new nag from CRAN who no longer want us to use the ‘non-API’ header function SET_S4_OBJECT so a small change was made.

The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.5 (2024-04-30)

  • Minor refactoring of internal code to not rely on SET_S4_OBJECT.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to the previous release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Fri, 26 Apr 2024

RcppSpdlog 0.0.17 on CRAN: New Upstream

Version 0.0.17 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN overnight following and has been uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This releases updates the code to the version 1.14 of spdlog which was release yesterday.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.17 (2024-04-25)

  • Minor continuous integration update

  • Upgraded to upstream release spdlog 1.14.0

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 16 Apr 2024

RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.2.1 on CRAN: Micro Fix

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) 1135 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 33.7 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 579 times according to Google Scholar.

Yesterday’s release accommodates reticulate by suspending a single test that now ‘croaks’ creating a reverse-dependency issue for that package. No other changes were made.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.2.1 (2024-04-15)

  • One-char bug fix release commenting out one test that upsets reticulate when accessing a scipy sparse matrix

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Fri, 05 Apr 2024

RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.2.0 on CRAN: Upstream Fix

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) 1136 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 33.5 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 578 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings a new upstream bugfix release Armadillo 12.8.2 prepared by Conrad two days ago. It took the usual day to noodle over 1100+ reverse dependencies and ensure two failures were independent of the upgrade (i.e., “no change to worse” in CRAN parlance). It took CRAN another because we hit a random network outage for (spurious) NOTE on a remote URL, and were then caught in the shrapnel from another large package ecosystem update spuriously pointing some build failures that were due to a missing rebuild to us. All good, as human intervention comes to the rescue.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.2.0 (2024-04-02)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.2 (Cortisol Injector)

    • Workaround for FFTW3 header clash

    • Workaround in testing framework for issue under macOS

    • Minor cleanups to reduce code bloat

    • Improved documentation

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 03 Mar 2024

RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.1.0 on CRAN: Upstream Fix, Interface Polish

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) 1130 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.8 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 578 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings a new upstream bugfix release Armadillo 12.8.1 prepared by Conrad yesterday. It was delayed for a few hours as CRAN noticed an error in one package which we all concluded was spurious as it could be reproduced outside of the one run there. Following from the previous release, we also use the slighty faster ‘Lighter’ header in the examples. And once it got to CRAN I also updated the Debian package.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.1.0 (2024-03-02)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.1 (Cortisol Injector)

    • Workaround in norm() for yet another bug in macOS accelerate framework

  • Update README for RcppArmadillo usage counts

  • Update examples to use '#include <RcppArmadillo/Lighter>' for faster compilation excluding unused Rcpp features

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 28 Feb 2024

RcppEigen 0.3.4.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, At Last

We are thrilled to share that RcppEigen has now upgraded to Eigen release 3.4.0! The new release 0.3.4.0.0 arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has been shipped to Debian as well. Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms.

This update has been in the works for a full two and a half years! It all started with a PR #102 by Yixuan bringing the package-local changes for R integration forward to usptream release 3.4.0. We opened issue #103 to steer possible changes from reverse-dependency checking through. Lo and behold, this just … stalled because a few substantial changes were needed and not coming. But after a long wait, and like a bolt out of a perfectly blue sky, Andrew revived it in January with a reverse depends run of his own along with a set of PRs. That was the push that was needed, and I steered it along with a number of reverse dependency checks, and occassional emails to maintainers. We managed to bring it down to only three packages having a hickup, and all three had received PRs thanks to Andrew – and even merged them. So the plan became to release today following a final fourteen day window. And CRAN was convinced by our arguments that we followed due process. So there it is! Big big thanks to all who helped it along, especially Yixuan and Andrew but also Mikael who updated another patch set he had prepared for the previous release series.

The complete NEWS file entry follows.

Changes in RcppEigen version 0.3.4.0.0 (2024-02-28)

  • The Eigen version has been upgrade to release 3.4.0 (Yixuan)

  • Extensive reverse-dependency checks ensure only three out of over 400 packages at CRAN are affected; PRs and patches helped other packages

  • The long-running branch also contains substantial contributions from Mikael Jagan (for the lme4 interface) and Andrew Johnson (revdep PRs)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Thu, 08 Feb 2024

RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, Interface Polish

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) 1119 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.5 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 575 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings a new (stable) upstream (minor) release Armadillo 12.8.0 prepared by Conrad two days ago. We, as usual, prepared a release candidate which we tested against the over 1100 CRAN packages using RcppArmadillo. This found no issues, which was confirmed by CRAN once we uploaded and so it arrived as a new release today in a fully automated fashion.

We also made a small change that had been prepared by GitHub issue #400: a few internal header files that were cluttering the top-level of the include directory have been moved to internal directories. The standard header is of course unaffected, and the set of ‘full / light / lighter / lightest’ headers (matching we did a while back in Rcpp) also continue to work as one expects. This change was also tested in a full reverse-dependency check in January but had not been released to CRAN yet.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.0.0 (2024-02-06)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.0 (Cortisol Injector)

    • Faster detection of symmetric expressions by pinv() and rank()

    • Expanded shift() to handle sparse matrices

    • Expanded conv_to for more flexible conversions between sparse and dense matrices

    • Added cbrt()

    • More compact representation of integers when saving matrices in CSV format

  • Five non-user facing top-level include files have been removed (#432 closing #400 and building on #395 and #396)

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 23 Jan 2024

RcppAnnoy 0.0.22 on CRAN: Maintenance

annoy image

A very minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.22, of RcppAnnoy has arrived on CRAN.

RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours—originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery algorithm. It had all the buzzwords already a decade ago: it is one of the algorithms behind (drum roll …) vector search as it finds approximate matches very quickly and also allows to persist the data.

This release responds to a CRAN request to clean up empty macros and sections in Rd files.

Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in version 0.0.22 (2024-01-23)

  • Replace empty examples macro to satisfy CRAN request.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Fri, 12 Jan 2024

RcppSpdlog 0.0.16 on CRAN: New Upstream

Version 0.0.16 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and will be uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This releases updates the code to the version 1.13 of spdlog which was release this morning.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.16 (2024-01-12)

  • Upgraded to upstream releases spdlog 1.13.0

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 09 Jan 2024

Rcpp 1.0.12 on CRAN: New Maintenance / Update Release

rcpp logo

The Rcpp Core Team is once again thrilled to announce a new release 1.0.12 of the Rcpp package. It arrived on CRAN early today, and has since been uploaded to Debian as well. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution–and of course at r2u should catch up tomorrow. The release was uploaded yesterday, and run its reverse dependencies overnight. Rcpp always gets flagged nomatter what because the grandfathered .Call(symbol) but … we had not single ‘change to worse’ among over 2700 reverse dependencies!

This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases available via the Rcpp drat repo and strongly encourage their use and testing—I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies.

Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2791 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 254 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.8% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.9% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 78.1 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1766 (JSS, 2011) and 292 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 617.

This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards.

The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.12 (2024-01-08)

  • Changes in Rcpp API:

    • Missing header includes as spotted by some recent tools were added in two places (Michael Chirico in #1272 closing #1271).

    • Casts to avoid integer overflow in matrix row/col selections have neem added (Aaron Lun #1281).

    • Three print format correction uncovered by R-devel were applied with thanks to Tomas Kalibera (Dirk in #1285).

    • Correct a print format correction in the RcppExports glue code (Dirk in #1288 fixing #1287).

    • The upcoming OBJSXP addition to R 4.4.0 is supported in the type2name mapper (Dirk and Iñaki in #1293).

  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

    • Generated interface code from base R that fails under LTO is now corrected (Iñaki in #1274 fixing a StackOverflow issue).

  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

    • The caption for third figure in the introductory vignette has been corrected (Dirk in #1277 fixing #1276).

    • A small formatting issue was correct in an Rd file as noticed by R-devel (Dirk in #1282).

    • The Rcpp FAQ vignette has been updated (Dirk in #1284).

    • The Rcpp.bib file has been refreshed to current package versions.

  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

    • The RcppExports file for an included test package has been updated (Dirk in #1289).

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues).

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sat, 09 Dec 2023

RcppInt64 0.0.4 on CRAN: Minor Bugfix

The new-ish package RcppInt64 (announced earlier this fall in this post, with two small updates following) arrived on CRAN minutes ago as relase 0.0.4. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package. It offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions ‘from’ and ‘to’.

This release addresses an issues Sebastian reported a few hours and which is reported by newer, pickier compilers: We need to include <cstdint> so that int64_t is declared. CRAN was at its usual best processing this efficiently including tests of the by now two reverse dependencies. Twenty two minutes total, all automated:

The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2023-12-09)

  • The cstdint header is now included (closes #1).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Mon, 04 Dec 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.6.6.1 on CRAN: No More Deprecation

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) 1126 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 31.7 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 569 times according to Google Scholar.

This release ends the practice on asking Armadillo to suppress deprecation warnings. RcppArmadillo, as noted, has a large user base. Sometimes Conrad sometimes made changes without too much of a heads-up so at times it was opportune to not bring those warnings to dozens (or maybe hundreds) of packages at CRAN. Yet we need to balance this with the demonstrable need to call out older deprecated code use. So sixteen months ago, with GitHub issue #391, we started to alert author of 30+ affected packages and supplied either pull requests or emailed patches to all. Eleven months ago GitHub issues #402 was added for a second deprecation.

And the time of making the switch has come. Release 0.12.6.6.1 no longer defines ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER. So among the over 1100 packages using RcppArmadillo at CRAN, around a good dozen or so were flagged in the upload – but CRAN concurred and let the package migrate to CRAN.

If you maintain an affected package, consider applying the patch or pull request now. A simple stop-gap measure also exists by adding -DARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER to src/Makevars as either PKG_CPPFLAGS or PKG_CXXFLAGS to reactivate it. But a proper code update, which is generally simple, may be better. If you are unsure, do not hesitate to get in touch.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.6.1 (2023-12-03)

  • Following the extendeded transition in #391 and #402, this release no longer sets ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER. Maintainers of affected packages have received pull requests or patches and can set -DARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER as PKG_CPPFLAGS.

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Thu, 30 Nov 2023

RcppClassicExamples 0.1.3 on CRAN: Maintenance

Another upgrade triggered solely by changing CRAN standards (see previous one from five years ago). This time it concerns warnings under r-devel with -Wformat -Wformat-security so we injected a number of "%s" into Rf_error() calls.

No new code or features. Full details below. And as a reminder, don’t use the old RcppClassic – use Rcpp instead.

Changes in version 0.1.3 (2023-11-30)

  • Update Rf_error() call to not tickle -Wformat

  • Minor other packaging and continuous integration tweaks

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 29 Nov 2023

RcppSpdlog 0.0.15 on CRAN: Maintenance

Version 0.0.15 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and will be uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This releases updates the code to address warning now shown under R-devel when -Wformat -Wformat-security are enabled. This amounted to re-generating RcppExports.cpp under an updated [Rcpp][rcpp] version. It also updates the package default help page by removing some stubs that were not filled in.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.15 (2023-11-29)

  • Correct default package help page slighly

  • RcppExports.cpp has been regenerated under an updated Rcpp to address a format string warning under R-devel

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

RcppQuantuccia 0.1.1 on CRAN: Maintenance

A minor release of RcppQuantuccia arrived on CRAN today. RcppQuantuccia started from the Quantuccia header-only subset / variant of QuantLib which it brings it to R. This project validated the idea of making the calendaring functionality of QuantLib available in a more compact and standalone project – which we now do with qlcal which can be seen as a successor to this.

This releases updates the code to address warning now shown under R-devel when -Wformat -Wformat-security are enabled. This amounted to re-generating RcppExports.cpp under an updated Rcpp version. We also no longer set C++14 explicitly as a compilation standard.

The complete list changes for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.2 (2023-11-29)

  • RcppExports.cpp has been regenerated under an updated Rcpp to address a format string warning under R-devel

  • The compilation standard is no longer set to C++14

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report relative to the previous release. More information is on the RcppQuantuccia page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 28 Nov 2023

RcppSimdJson 0.1.11 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new maintenance release 0.1.11 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN.

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 release responds to a CRAN request to address issues now identified by -Wformat -Wformat-security. These are frequently pretty simple changes as it was here: all it took was an call to compileAttributes() from an updated Rcpp version which now injects "%s" as a format string when calling Rf_error().

The (very short) NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.11 (2023-11-28)

  • RcppExports.cpp has been regenerated under an update Rcpp to address a print format warning (Dirk in #88).

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.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Mon, 27 Nov 2023

RcppCNPy 0.2.12 on CRAN: More Maintenance

A new (and again somewhat minor) maintenance release of the RcppCNPy package arrived on CRAN earlier today.

RcppCNPy provides R with read and write access to NumPy files thanks to the cnpy library by Carl Rogers along with Rcpp for the glue to R.

Recent changes in r-devel hone in on issues concerning printf format string inaccuracies the compiler can detect via the -Wformat -Wformat-security flags. Two fairly simplye ones were present here and have been addressed. In the time since the last release about twenty months ago two or three other minor packaging and setup details have also been taken care of, details are below.

Changes in version 0.2.12 (2022-11-27)

  • The continuous integration workflow received a trivial update, twice.

  • The C++ compilation standard is now implicit per CRAN and R preference.

  • The CITATION file format has been updated for the current usage.

  • Two print format string issues reported by current R-devel have been addressed.

CRANberries also provides a diffstat report for the latest release. As always, feedback is welcome and the best place to start a discussion may be the GitHub issue tickets page.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Fri, 03 Nov 2023

RcppEigen 0.3.3.9.4 on CRAN: Maintenance, Matrix Changes

A new release 0.3.3.9.4 of RcppEigen arrived on CRAN yesterday, and went to Debian today. Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms.

This update contains a small amount of the usual maintenance (see below), along with a very nice pull request by Mikael Jagan which simplifies to interface with the Matrix package and inparticular the CHOLMOD library that is part of SuiteSparse. This release is coordinated with lme4 and OpenMx which are also being updated.

The complete NEWS file entry follows.

Changes in RcppEigen version 0.3.3.9.4 (2023-11-01)

  • The CITATION file has been updated for the new bibentry style.

  • The package skeleton generator has been updated and no longer sets an Imports:.

  • Some README.md URLs and badged have been updated.

  • The use of -fopenmp has been documented in Makevars, and a simple thread-count reporting function has been added.

  • The old manual src/init.c has been replaced by an autogenerated version, the RcppExports file have regenerated

  • The interface to package Matrix has been updated and simplified thanks to an excllent patch by Mikael Jagan.

  • The new upload is coordinated with packages lme4 and OpenMx.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 31 Oct 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.6.6.0 on CRAN: Bugfix, Thread Throttling

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) 1110 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 31.2 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 563 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings upstream bugfix releases 12.6.5 (sparse matrix corner case) and 12.6.6 with an ARPACK correction. Conrad released it this this morning, I had been running reverse dependency checks anyway and knew we were in good shape so for once I did not await a full run against the now over 1100 (!!) packages using RcppArmadillo.

This release also contains a change I prepared on Sunday and which helps with much-criticized (and rightly I may add) insistence by CRAN concerning ‘throttling’. The motivation is understandable: CRAN tests many packages at once on beefy servers and can ill afford tests going off and requesting numerous cores. But rather than providing a global setting at their end, CRAN insists that each package (!!) deals with this. The recent traffic on the helpful-as-ever r-pkg-devel mailing clearly shows that this confuses quite a few package developers. Some have admitted to simply turning examples and tests off: a net loss for all of us. Now, Armadillo defaults to using up to eight cores (which is enough to upset CRAN) when running with OpenMP (which is generally only on Linux for “reasons” I rather not get into…). With this release I expose a helper functions (from OpenMP) to limit this. I also set up an example package and repo RcppArmadilloOpenMPEx detailing this, and added a demonstration of how to use the new throttlers to the fastLm example. I hope this proves useful to users of the package.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.6.0 (2023-10-31)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.6 (Cortisol Retox)

    • Fix eigs_sym(), eigs_gen() and svds() to generate deterministic results in ARPACK mode

  • Add helper functions to set and get the number of OpenMP threads

  • Store initial thread count at package load and use in thread-throttling helper (and resetter) suitable for CRAN constraints

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.5.0 (2023-10-14)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.5 (Cortisol Retox)

    • Fix for corner-case bug in handling sparse matrices with no non-zero elements

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 19 Sep 2023

RcppInt64 0.0.3 on CRAN: Now with nanotime Support

The still new package RcppInt64 (announced two weeks ago in this post, with this followup last week) arrived on CRAN earlier today in its second update and relase 0.0.3. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package by providing a single header. It offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions ‘from’ and ‘to’.

This release adds support for the corresponding nanotime conversion between R and C++. nanotime is leveraging the same bit64-based reprensentation of 64-bit integers for nanosecond resolution timestamps. A thorough S4 wrapping the offers R based access for convenient and powerful operations at nanosecond resolution. And as tweeted (here and here), tooted (here and here), and skeeted (here and here) in a quick preview last Sunday, it makes for easy and expressive code.

The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2023-09-19)

  • The as<>() and wrap() converters are now declared inline.

  • Conversion to and from nanotime has been added.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 12 Sep 2023

RcppInt64 0.0.2 on CRAN: Small Update

The still very new package RcppInt64 (announced a week ago in this post) arrived on CRAN earlier today in its first update, now at 0.0.2. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package by providing a single header. It offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions ‘from’ and ‘to’.

The package by now has its first user as we rearranged RcppFarmHash to use it. The change today makes bit64 a weak rather than strong dependency as we use it only for tests and illustrations. We also added two missing fields to DESCRIPTION and added badges to README.md.

The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2023-09-12)

  • DESCRIPTION has been extended, badges have been added to README.md

  • Package bit64 is now a Suggests:

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a [diffstat report relative to previous release][this release].

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 10 Sep 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.6.4.0 on CRAN: Another 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) 1096 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 30.5 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 552 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.6.4. Conrad prepared this a few days ago; it takes me the usual day or so to run reverse-dependency check against the by-now almost 1100 CRAN packages using RcppArmadillo. And this time, CRAN thought it had found two issues when I submitted and it took two more days til we were all clear about those two being false positives (as can, and does, happen). So today it reached CRAN.

The set of changes follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.4.0 (2023-09-06)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.4 (Cortisol Retox)

    • Workarounds for bugs in Apple accelerate framework

    • Fix incorrect calculation of rcond for band matrices in solve()

    • Remove expensive and seldom used optimisations, leading to faster compilation times

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sat, 09 Sep 2023

RcppFarmHash 0.0.3 on CRAN: Small Update

A minor maintenance release of the RcppFarmHash package is now on CRAN as version 0.0.3.

RcppFarmHash wraps the Google FarmHash family of hash functions (written by Geoff Pike and contributors) that are used for example by Google BigQuery for the FARM_FINGERPRINT digest.

This releases farms out the conversion to the integer64 add-on type in R to the new package RcppInt64 released a few days ago and adds some minor maintenance on continuous integration and alike.

The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2023-09-09)

  • Rely on new RcppInt64 package and its header for conversion

  • Minor updates to continuous integration and README.md

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 05 Sep 2023

RcppInt64 0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package!

Happy to share that a new package RcppInt64 arrived on CRAN earlier today after a brief one-day inspection round. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package.

A single header is provided. It actually offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions ‘from’ and ‘to’. A key difficulty faced when supporting 64 bit integer payloads is that R has no proper type for it so the standard template-based approaches use by Rcpp do not apply. To ‘carry’ 64 bit integers, the clever approach by Jens Oehlschlägel and his bit64 package is used. However, its use of a double to transport the int64 payload means we must take care to not uninentionally interpret the double variables as, well, double. So we use an simple S3 class in R, and check for it. With some care (as provided by these helper functions) this works well.

The RcppInt64 packages contains both an example function, as well as an entire example package to demonstrate how to use these facilities in your package. We hope others will find this useful.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 20 Aug 2023

RcppRedis 0.2.4 on CRAN: Maintenance

Another minor release, now at 0.2.4, of our RcppRedis package arrived on CRAN yesterday. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads on a trading floor for several years. It also supports pub/sub dissemination of streaming market data as per this earlier example.

This update is (just like the previous one) fairly mechanical. CRAN noticed a shortcoming of the default per-package help page in a number of packages, in our case it was matter of adding one line for a missing alias to the Rd file. We also demoted the mention of the suggested (but retired) rredis package to a mere mention in the DESCRIPTION file as a formal Suggests: entry, even with an added Additional_repositories, create a NOTE. Life is simpler without those,

The detailed changes list follows.

Changes in version 0.2.4 (2023-08-19)

  • Add missing alias for ‘RcppRedis-package’ to rhiredis.Rd.

  • Remove Suggests: rredis which triggers a NOTE nag as it is only on an ‘Additional_repositories’.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this this release. More information is on the RcppRedis page.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Thu, 10 Aug 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.6.1.0 on CRAN: New Upstream

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 30.1 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 545 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.6.1. Conrad release 12.6.0 when CRAN went on summer break. I rolled it up ran the full reverse-depenency check against the now more than 1000 packages. And usage from one those revealed a corner-case bug (of not always ‘flattening’ memory for sparse matrices to zero values) so 12.6.1 followed. This is what was uploaded today. And as I prepared it earlier in the week as CRAN reopened, Conrad released a new 12.6.2. However, its changes are only concerned with settings for Armadillo-internal use of its random number generators (RNGs). And as RcppArmadillo connects Armadillo to the RNGs provided by R, the upgrade does not affect R users at all. However it is available in the github repo, in the Rcpp drap repo and at r-universe.

The set of changes for this RcppArmadillo release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.1.0 (2023-07-26)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.1 (Cortisol Retox)

    • faster multiplication of dense vectors by sparse matrices (and vice versa)

    • faster eigs_sym() and eigs_gen()

    • faster conv() and conv2() when using OpenMP

    • added diags() and spdiags() for generating band matrices from set of vectors

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Mon, 10 Jul 2023

RcppSpdlog 0.0.14 on CRAN: Upstream Update

Version 0.0.14 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and has just been uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This release simply brings an update to the just release spdlog 1.12.0 from a few days ago.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.14 (2023-07-09)

  • Added new badge to README.md

  • Upgraded to upstream releases spdlog 1.12.0

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Thu, 06 Jul 2023

Rcpp 1.0.11 on CRAN: Updates and Maintenance

rcpp logo

The Rcpp Core Team is delighted to announce that the newest release 1.0.11 of the Rcpp package arrived on CRAN and in Debian earlier today. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution–and of course at r2u. The release was finalized three days ago, but given the widespread use and extended reverse dependencies at CRAN it usually takes a few days to be processed. This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases available via the Rcpp drat repo and strongly encourage their use and testing—I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies.

Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2720 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 251 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.7% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.6% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 72.5 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1678 (JSS, 2011) and 259 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 588.

This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards.

The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp version 1.0.11 (2023-07-03)

  • Changes in Rcpp API:

    • Rcpp:::CxxFlags() now quotes only non-standard include path on linux (Lukasz in #1243 closing #1242).

    • Two unit tests no longer accidentally bark on stdout (Dirk and Iñaki in #1245).

    • Compilation under C++20 using clang++ and its standard library is enabled (Dirk in #1248 closing #1244).

    • Use backticks in a generated .Call() statement in RcppExports.R (Dirk #1256 closing #1255).

    • Switch to system2() to capture standard error messages in error cases (Iñaki in #1259 and #1261 fixing #1257).

  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

    • The CITATION file format has been updated (Dirk in #1250 fixing #1249).

  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

    • A test for qnorm now uses the more accurate value from R 4.3.0 (Dirk in #1252 and #1260 fixing #1251).

    • Skip tests with path issues on Windows (Iñaki in #1258).

    • Container deployment in continuous integrations was improved. (Iñaki and Dirk in #1264, Dirk in #1269).

    • Several files receives minor edits to please R CMD check from r-devel (Dirk in #1267).

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2994 previous questions.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 02 Jul 2023

RcppAnnoy 0.0.21 on CRAN: Upstream Update

annoy image

Another minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.20, of RcppAnnoy has arrived on CRAN.

RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours—originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery algorithm.

This release mainly updates the included copy of Annoy to version 1.7.3 which now provides a C++ namespace in the header API. So I sent a pair of PRs to uwot to update its (compiled) use, which James promptly merged. With that the CRAN update was once again seamless. Otherwise the package follows current custom by moving away from C++11 as a set compilation standard to be open for more modern C++ idioms. Here, this allows in particular for possible multithreaded indexing for which everything needed is in C++17. However, we did not turn multithreaded indexing on as the RNG use is such that the streams would differ leading to slightly different (if of course equivalent) results. Users can enable this by recompiling with the switch flipped, see src/Makevars.

Changes in version 0.0.21 (2023-07-02)

  • The build setup switched from C++11 to C++17 which offers threading support (which remains off by default to ensure consistent results)

  • Upstream code was update to Annoy 1.17.3, the switch to an explicit C++ namespace has been accomodated (Dirk in #75)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Mon, 19 Jun 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.4.1.0 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) 1079 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 29.6 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 543 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.4.1 made by Conrad at the end of last week. As usual, I prepared the usual release candidate, tested on the over 1000 reverse depends (which sadly takes a long time on old hardware), found no issues and sent it to CRAN. Where it got tested again and was by a stroke of bad luck upheld for two unrelated issue (one package fell over one of its other dependencies changing a data representation, another fell afoul of a tightened test on total test time) so this awaited the usual email handshake with the CRAN maintainers … and the weekend got in the way. The release also contains a PR kindly provided by Mikael Jagan for an upcoming change in package Matrix.

As a bugfix release, the set of changes is fairly small.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.4.1.0 (2023-06-17)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.4.1 (Cortisol Profusion Redux)

    • fix bug in SpMat::shed_cols()

    • functions such as .is_finite() and find_nonfinite() will now emit a runtime warning when compiled in fast math mode; such compilation mode disables detection of non-finite values

  • Accommodate upcoming change in package Matrix (Mikael Jagan in #417 addressing #415)

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sat, 17 Jun 2023

RcppSpdlog 0.0.13 on CRAN: Small Extensions

Version 0.0.13 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and will be soon be uploaded to Debian too. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the package documention site.

This release adds a small (but handy) accessor generalisation: Instead of calling setup() with two arguments for a label and the logging level we now only require the desired level. We also cleaned up one implementation detail for the stopwatch feature added in January, and simplified the default C++ compilation standard setting.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.13 (2023-06-17)

  • Minor tweak to stopwatch setup avoids pulling in fmt

  • No longer set a C++ compilation standard as the default choices by R are sufficient for the package

  • Add convenience wrapper log_init omitting first argument to log_setup while preserving the interface from the latter

  • Add convenience setup wrappers init and log to API header file spdl.h

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sat, 27 May 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.4.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream Minor

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) 1074 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 29.3 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 535 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings a new upstream release 12.4.0 made by Conrad a day or so ago. I prepared the usual release candidate, tested on the over 1000 reverse depends (which sadly takes almost a day on old hardware), found no issues and sent it to CRAN. Where it got tested again and was once again auto-processed smoothly by CRAN within a few hours on a Friday night which is just marvelous. So this time I tweeted about it too.

The releases actually has a relatively small set of changes as a second follow-up release in the 12.* series.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.4.0.0 (2023-05-26)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.4.0 (Cortisol Profusion Redux)

    • Added norm2est() for finding fast estimates of matrix 2-norm (spectral norm)

    • Added vecnorm() for obtaining the vector norm of each row or column of a matrix

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.

If you like my open-source work, you may consider sponsoring 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 14 May 2023

RcppSimdJson 0.1.10 on CRAN: New Upstream

We are happy to share that the RcppSimdJson package has been updated to release 0.1.10.

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 release updates the underlying simdjson library to version 3.1.8 (also made today). Otherwise we only made a minor edit to the README and adjusted one tweek for code coverage.

The (very short) NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.10 (2023-05-14)

  • simdjson was upgraded to version 3.1.8 (Dirk in #85).

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.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 05 Apr 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.2.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream Minor

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) 1052 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 28.6 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 522 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings a new upstream release 12.2.0 made by Conrad a day or so ago. We prepared the usual release candidate, tested on the over 1000 reverse depends, found no issues and sent it to CRAN. Where it got tested again and was auto-processed smoothly by CRAN.

The releases actually has a relatively small set of changes as a first follow-up release in the 12.2.* series.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.2.0.0 (2023-04-04)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.2.0 (Cortisol Profusion Deluxe)

    • more efficient use of FFTW3 by fft() and ifft()

    • faster in-place element-wise multiplication of sparse matrices by dense matrices

    • added spsolve_factoriser class to allow reuse of sparse matrix factorisation for solving systems of linear equations

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 22 Mar 2023

RcppSMC 0.2.7 on CRAN: Extensions and Update

A new release 0.2.7 of our RcppSMC package arrived at CRAN earlier today. It contains several extensions added by team member (and former GSoC student) Ilya Zarubin since the last release. We were a little slow to release those—but “one of those CRAN emails” forced our hand for a release now. The updated ‘uninitialized variable’ messages in clang++-16 have found a fan in Brian Ripley, and so he sent us a note. And as the issue was trivially reproducible with clang++-15 here too I had it fixed in no time. And both changes taken together form the incremental 0.2.7 release.

RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter in some contexts. The package now also features the Google Summer of Code work by Leah South in 2017, and by Ilya Zarubin in 2021.

The release is summarized below.

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.2.7 (2023-03-22)

  • Extensive extensions for conditional SMC and resample, updated hello_world example, added skeleton function for easier package creation (Ilya in #67,#72)

  • Small package updates (Dirk in #75 fixing #74)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release.

More information is on the RcppSMC page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 08 Mar 2023

RcppRedis 0.2.3 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new minor release 0.2.3 of our RcppRedis package arrived on CRAN today. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads on a trading floor for several years.

This update is fairly mechanical. CRAN wants everybody off the C++11 train which is fair game given that it 2023 and most sane and lucky people are facing sane and modern compilers so this makes sense. (And I raise a toast to all those poor souls facing RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 with a compiler from many moons ago: I hear it is a vibrant job market out there so maybe time to make a switch…). As with a few of my other packages, this release simply does away with the imposition of C++11 as the package will compile just fine under C++14 or C++17 (as governed by your version of R).

The detailed changes list follows.

Changes in version 0.2.3 (2023-03-08)

  • No longer set a C++ compilation standard as the default choices by R are sufficient for the package

  • Switch include to Rcpp/Rcpp which signals use of all Rcpp features including Modules

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppRedis page.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Mon, 06 Mar 2023

RcppFastAD 0.0.1 and 0.0.2: New Package on CRAN!

James Yang and I are thrilled to announce the new CRAN package RcppFastAD which arrived at CRAN last Monday as version 0.0.1, and is as of today at version 0.0.2 with a first set of small updates.

It is based on the FastAD header-only C++ library by James which provides a C++ implementation of both forward and reverse mode of automatic differentiation in an easy-to-use header library (which we wrapped here) 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. Included in the package are three example: a simple quadratic expression evaluating x' S x for given x and S return the expression value with a gradient, a linear regression example generalising this and using the gradient to derive to arrive at the least-squares minimizing solution, as well as the well-known Black-Scholes options pricer and its important partial derivatives delta, rho, theta and vega derived via automatic differentiation.

The NEWS file for these two initial releases follows.

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2023-03-05)

  • One C++ operation is protected from operating on a nullptr

  • Additional tests have been added, tests now cover all three demo / example functions

  • Return values and code for the examples linear_regression and quadratic_expression have been adjusted

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2023-02-24)

  • Initial release version and CRAN upload

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.

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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 22 Feb 2023

RcppArmadillo 0.12.0.1.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, New Features

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) 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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 29 Jan 2023

RcppTOML 0.2.2 on CRAN: Now with macOS-on-Intel Builds

Just days after a build-fix release (for aarch64) and still only a few weeks after the 0.2.0 release of RcppTOML and its switch to toml++, we have another bugfix release 0.2.2 on CRAN also bringing release 3.3.0 of toml++ (even if we had large chunks of 3.3.0 already incorporated).

TOML is a file format that is most suitable for configurations, as it is meant to be edited by humans but read by computers. It emphasizes strong readability for humans while at the same time supporting strong typing as well as immediate and clear error reports. On small typos you get parse errors, rather than silently corrupted garbage. Much preferable to any and all of XML, JSON or YAML – though sadly these may be too ubiquitous now. TOML is frequently being used with the projects such as the Hugo static blog compiler, or the Cargo system of Crates (aka “packages”) for the Rust language.

The package was building fine on Intel-based macOS provided the versions were recent enough. CRAN, however, aims for the broadest possibly reach of binaries and builds on a fairly ancient macOS 10.13 with clang version 10. This confused toml++ into (wrongly) concluding it could not build when it in fact can. After a hint from Simon that Apple in their infinite wisdom redefines clang version ids, this has been reflected in version 3.3.0 of toml++ by Mark so we should now build everywhere. Big thanks to everybody for the help.

The short summary of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.2.2 (2023-01-29)

  • New toml++ version 3.3.0 with fix to permit compilation on ancient macOS systems as used by CRAN for the Intel-based builds.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppTOML page page. Please use the GitHub issue tracker for issues and bugreports.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 25 Jan 2023

RcppTOML 0.2.1 on CRAN: Small Build Fix for Some Arches

Two weeks after the release of RcppTOML 0.2.0 and the switch to toml++, we have a quick bugfix release 0.2.1.

TOML is a file format that is most suitable for configurations, as it is meant to be edited by humans but read by computers. It emphasizes strong readability for humans while at the same time supporting strong typing as well as immediate and clear error reports. On small typos you get parse errors, rather than silently corrupted garbage. Much preferable to any and all of XML, JSON or YAML – though sadly these may be too ubiquitous now. TOML is frequently being used with the projects such as the Hugo static blog compiler, or the Cargo system of Crates (aka “packages”) for the Rust language.

Some architectures, aarch64 included, got confused over ‘float16’ which is of course a tiny two-byte type nobody should need. After consulting with Mark we concluded to (at least for now) simply override this excluding the use of ‘float16’.

The short summary of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.2.1 (2023-01-25)

  • Explicitly set -DTOML_ENABLE_FLOAT16=0 to permit compilation on some architectures stumbling of the type.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppTOML page page. Please use the GitHub issue tracker for issues and bugreports.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sun, 22 Jan 2023

Rcpp 1.0.10 on CRAN: Regular Update

rcpp logo

The Rcpp team is thrilled to announce the newest release 1.0.10 of the Rcpp package which is hitting CRAN now and will go to Debian shortly. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course at r2u. The release was prepared a few days ago, but given the widespread use at CRAN it took a few days to be processed. As always, our sincere thanks to the CRAN maintainers Uwe Ligges and Kurt Hornik. This release continues with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases available via the Rcpp drat repo and strongly encourage their use and testing—I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, around 2623 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 252 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.7% of all packages depend (directly) on CRAN, and 58.7% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 67.1 million times.

This release is incremental as usual, preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly. Of particular note is the now fully-enabled use of the ‘unwind’ protection making some operations a little faster by default; special thanks to Iñaki for spearheading this. Kevin and I also polished a few other bugs off as detailed below.

The full list of details follows.

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.10 (2023-01-12)

  • Changes in Rcpp API:

    • Unwind protection is enabled by default (Iñaki in #1225). It can be disabled by defining RCPP_NO_UNWIND_PROTECT before including Rcpp.h. RCPP_USE_UNWIND_PROTECT is not checked anymore and has no effect. The associated plugin unwindProtect is therefore deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

    • The 'finalize' method for Rcpp Modules is now eagerly materialized, fixing an issue where errors can occur when Module finalizers are run (Kevin in #1231 closing #1230).

    • Zero-row data.frame objects can receive push_back or push_front (Dirk in #1233 fixing #1232).

    • One remaining sprintf has been replaced by snprintf (Dirk and Kevin in #1236 and #1237).

    • Several conversion warnings found by clang++ have been addressed (Dirk in #1240 and #1241).

  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

    • The C++20, C++2b (experimental) and C++23 standards now have plugin support like the other C++ standards (Dirk in #1228).

    • The source path for attributes received one more protection from spaces (Dirk in #1235 addressing #1234).

  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

    • Several GitHub Actions have been updated.

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2932 previous questions.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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/rcpp | permanent link

Sat, 21 Jan 2023

RcppSimdJson 0.1.9 on CRAN: New Upstream

The RcppSimdJson package was just updated to release 0.1.9.

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 release updates the underlying simdjson library to version 3.0.1, settles on C++17 as the language standard, exports a worker function for direct C(++) access, and polishes a few small things around the package and tests.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.9 (2023-01-21)

  • The internal function deseralize_json is now exported at the C++ level as well as in R (Dirk in #81 closing #80).

  • simdjson was upgraded to version 3.0.1 (Dirk in #83).

  • The package now defaults to C++17 compilation; configure has been retired (Dirk closing #82).

  • The three main R access functions now use a more compact argument check via stopifnot (Dirk).

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.

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/rcpp | permanent link

RcppFastFloat 0.0.4 on CRAN: New Upstream

A new release of RcppFastFloat arrived on CRAN yesterday. The package wraps fast_float, another nice library by Daniel Lemire. For details, see the arXiv paper showing that one can convert character representations of ‘numbers’ into floating point at rates at or exceeding one gigabyte per second.

This release updates the underlying fast_float library version. Special thanks to Daniel Lemire for quickly accomodating a parsing use case we had encode as a test, namely with various whitespace codes. The default in fast_float, as in C++17, is to be more narrow but we enable the wider use case via two #define statements.

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2023-01-20)

  • Update to fast_float 3.9.0

  • Set two #define re-establish prior behaviour with respect to whitespace removal prior to parsing for as.double2()

  • Small update to continuous integration actions

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

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/rcpp | permanent link