RcppArmadillo 14.0.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream
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 matricesExpanded relational operators to handle expressions between sparse matrices and scalars
Added
.as_dense()to obtain dense vector/matrix representation of any sparse matrix expressionUpdated physical constants to NIST 2022 CODATA values
New package version numbering scheme following upstream versions
Re-enabling
ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKEfor 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.
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This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
