Thinking inside the box

Mon, 18 Nov 2024

RcppArmadillo 14.2.0-1 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) 1191 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 37.2 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 603 times according to Google Scholar.

Conrad released a minor version 14.2.0 a few days ago after we spent about two weeks with several runs of reverse-dependency checks covering corner cases. After a short delay at CRAN due to a false positive on a test, a package failing tests we also failed under the previous version, and some concern over new deprecation warnings _whem using the headers directly as _e.g. mlpack R package does we are now on CRAN. I noticed a missing feature under large ‘64bit word’ (for large floating-point matrices) and added an exporter for icube going to double to support the 64-bit integer range (as we already did, of course, for vectors and matrices). Changes since the last CRAN release are summarised below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.2.0-1 (2024-11-16)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.2.0 (Smooth Caffeine)

Faster handling of symmetric matrices by inv() and rcond()

Faster handling of hermitian matrices by inv(), rcond(), cond(), pinv(), rank()

Added solve_opts::force_sym option to solve() to force the use of the symmetric solver

More efficient handling of compound expressions by solve()

Added exporter specialisation for icube for the ARMA_64BIT_WORD case

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, 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

Sun, 10 Nov 2024

inline 0.3.20: Mostly Maintenance

A new release of the inline package got to CRAN today marking the first release in three and half years. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the very early days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene providing an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still used by rstan and a number of other packages.

This release was tickled by changing in r-devel just this week, and the corresponding ‘please fix or else’ email I received this morning. R_NO_REMAP is now the default in r-devel, and while we had already converted most (old-style) calls into the API to using the now mandatory Rf_ prefix, the package contained few remaining cases in examples as well as one in code generation. The release also contains a helpful contributed PR making an error message a little clearer, plus several small and common maintenance changed around continuous integration, package layout and the repository.

The NEWS extract follows and details the changes some more.

Changes in inline version 0.3.20 (2024-11-10)

Error message formatting is improved for compileCode (Alexis Derumigny in #25)

Switch to using Authors@R, other general packaging maintenance for continuous integration and repository

Use Rf_ in a handful of cases as R-devel now mandates it

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.

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Sat, 02 Nov 2024

Rcpp 1.0.13-1 on CRAN: Hot Fix

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

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.

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Tue, 29 Oct 2024

gcbd 0.2.7 on CRAN: More Mere Maintenance

Another pure maintenance release 0.2.7 of the gcbd package is now on CRAN. The gcbd proposes a benchmarking framework for LAPACK and BLAS operations (as the library can exchanged in a plug-and-play sense on suitable OSs) and records result in local database. Its original motivation was to also compare to GPU-based operations. However, as it is both challenging to keep CUDA working packages on CRAN providing the basic functionality appear to come and go so testing the GPU feature can be challenging. The main point of gcbd is now to actually demonstrate that ‘yes indeed’ we can just swap BLAS/LAPACK libraries without any change to R, or R packages. The ‘configure / rebuild R for xyz’ often seen with ‘xyz’ being Goto or MKL is simply plain wrong: you really can just swap them (on proper operating systems, and R configs – see the package vignette for more). But nomatter how often we aim to correct this record, it invariably raises its head another time.

This release accommodates a CRAN change request as we were referencing the (now only suggested) package gputools. As hinted in the previous paragraph, it was once on CRAN but is not right now so we adjusted our reference.

CRANberries also provides a diffstat report for the latest 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.

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Mon, 21 Oct 2024

drat 0.2.5 on CRAN: Small Updates

drat user

A new minor release of the drat package arrived on CRAN today, which is just over a year since the previous release. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code.

Because for once it really is as your mother told you: Friends don’t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Properly rolled-up releases it is. Just how CRAN shows us: a model that has demonstrated for over two-and-a-half decades how to do this. And you can too: drat is easy to use, documented by six vignettes and just works. Detailed information about drat is at its documentation site. That said, and ‘these days’, if you mainly care about github code then r-universe is there too, also offering binaries its makes and all that jazz. But sometimes you just want to, or need to, roll a local repository and drat can help you there.

This release contains a small PR (made by Arne Holmin just after the previous release) adding support for an ‘OSflacour’ variable (helpful for macOS). We also corrected an issue with one test file being insufficiently careful of using git2r only when installed, and as usual did a round of maintenance for the package concerning both continuous integration and documentation.

The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.2.5 (2024-10-21)

Function insertPackage has a new optional argument OSflavour (Arne Holmin in #142)

A test file conditions correctly about git2r being present (Dirk)

Several smaller packaging updates and enhancements to continuous integration and documentation have been added (Dirk)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page as well as at the documentation 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/drat | permanent link

Tue, 15 Oct 2024

qlcal 0.0.13 on CRAN: Small Calendar Update

The thirteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.

qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page.

This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.36 (made this week) and contains some minor updates to two calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.13 (2024-10-15)

Synchronized with QuantLib 1.36 released yesterday

Calendar updates for South Korea and Poland

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples. 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/qlcal | 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

Sat, 28 Sep 2024

RApiSerialize 0.1.4 on CRAN: Added C++ Namespace

A new minor release 0.1.5 of RApiSerialize arrived on CRAN today. The RApiSerialize package is used by both my RcppRedis as well as by Travers excellent qs package. This release adds an optional C++ namespace, available when the API header file is included in a C++ source file. And as one often does, the release also brings a few small updates to different aspects of the packaging.

Changes in version 0.1.4 (2024-09-28)

Add C++ namespace in API header (Dirk in #9 closing #8)

Several packaging updates: switched to Authors@R, README.md badge updates, added .editorconfig and cleanup

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More details are at the RApiSerialize page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository rapiserializerepo.

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/rapiserialize | 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

Wed, 18 Sep 2024

Rblpapi 0.3.15: Updated and New BLP Library

bloomberg terminal

Version 0.3.15 of the Rblpapi package arrived on CRAN today. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is required).

This is the fifteenth release since the package first appeared on CRAN in 2016. This release updates to the current version 3.24.6 of the Bloomberg API, and rounds out a few corners in the packaging from continuous integration to the vignette.

The detailed list of changes follow below.

Changes in Rblpapi version 0.3.15 (2024-09-18)

A warning is now issued if more than 1000 results are returned (John in #377 addressing #375)

A few typos in the rblpapi-intro vignette were corrected (Michael Streatfield in #378)

The continuous integration setup was updated (Dirk in #388)

Deprecation warnings over char* where C++ class Name is now preferred have been addressed (Dirk in #391)

Several package files have been updated (Dirk in #392)

The request formation has been corrected, and an example was added (Dirk and John in #394 and #396)

The Bloomberg API has been upgraded to release 3.24.6.1 (Dirk in #397)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is at the Rblpapi repo or the Rblpapi page. Questions, comments etc should go to the issue tickets system at the GitHub repo.

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/rblpapi | permanent link

Mon, 16 Sep 2024

nanotime 0.3.10 on CRAN: Update

A minor update 0.3.10 for our nanotime package is now on CRAN. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, using the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations.

This release updates one S4 methods to very recent changes in r-devel for which CRAN had reached out. This concerns the setdiff() method when applied to two nanotime objects. As it only affected R 4.5.0, due next April, if rebuilt in the last two or so weeks it will not have been visible to that many users, if any. In any event, it now works again for that setup too, and should be going forward.

We also retired one demo function from the very early days, apparently it relied on ggplot2 features that have since moved on. If someone would like to help out and resurrect the demo, please get in touch. We also cleaned out some no longer used tests, and updated DESCRIPTION to what is required now. The NEWS snippet below has the full details.

Changes in version 0.3.10 (2024-09-16)

Retire several checks for Solaris in test suite (Dirk in #130)

Switch to Authors@R in DESCRIPTION as now required by CRAN

Accommodate R-devel change for setdiff (Dirk in #133 fixing #132)

No longer ship defunction ggplot2 demo (Dirk fixing #131)

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository – and all documentation is provided at the nanotime documentation 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/nanotime | 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

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.

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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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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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

Fri, 30 Aug 2024

pkgKitten 0.2.4 on CRAN: Updates

kitten

A shiny new release 0.2.4 of pkgKitten arrived on CRAN earlier, and has also been been uploaded to Debian. pkgKitten makes it simple to create new R packages via a simple function invocation. A wrapper kitten.r exists in the littler package to make it even easier.

This release contains several improvements to the (optional) setup of the (wonderful) tinytest package, now supports the (now mandatory) ‘Authors@R’ and polished a few aspect around the package repository and continuous integrations.

The set of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.2.4 (2024-08-30)

The .Rbuildignore stanza now includes .github

The support of and usage illustrations of tinytest are much enhanced (Paul Hudor in #18 adressing #19 and #20)

The .gitignore file now includes C++ related files

Improvements and polish to badges and continuous integration

The DESCRIPTION file now contains an Authors@R entry

More details about the package are at the pkgKitten webpage, the pkgKitten docs site, and the pkgKitten GitHub repo.

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/pkgkitten | 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.

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Mon, 19 Aug 2024

digest 0.6.37 on CRAN: Maintenance

Release 0.6.37 of the digest package arrived at CRAN today and has also been uploaded to Debian.

digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects. It can use a number different hashing algorithms (md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, blake3,crc32c, xxh3_64 and xxh3_128), and enables easy comparison of (potentially large and nested) R language objects as it relies on the native serialization in R. It is a mature and widely-used package (with 70.8 million downloads just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various objects.

This release updates one of the different hashing source functions which, to remain close to their upstream, used Free() and Calloc() (uppercased to use the R allocator) but not the prefixed stricter versions R_Free() and R_Calloc(). R will switch to enforcing these in the next release next year. Kevin had noticed (while doing some other testing) that this now fails under R-devel (with a switch set), and prepares a very nice and clean PR to take care of it. As of today, CRAN is now sending ‘please fix, or else …’ notes so it was a good time to send this to CRAN. We also updated some remaining http URLs in the README.md to https, and switched to Author/Maintainer field to the now also mandatory Authors@R.

My CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. For documentation (including the changelog) see the documentation site.

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.

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Fri, 16 Aug 2024

RcppEigen 0.3.4.0.1 on CRAN: Minor Maintenance

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.

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Wed, 31 Jul 2024

RQuantLib 0.4.24 on CRAN: Robustification

A new minor release 0.4.24 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN this afternoon (just before the CRAN summer break starting tomorrow), and has been uploaded to Debian too.

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

This release of RQuantLib follows the recent release from last week which updated to QuantLib version 1.35 released that week, and solidifies conditional code for older QuantLib versions in one source file. We also updated and extended the configure source file, and increased the mininum version of QuantLib to 1.25.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.24 (2024-07-31)

Updated detection of QuantLib libraries in configure

The minimum version has been increased to QuantLib 1.25, and DESCRIPTION has been updated to state it too

The dividend case for vanilla options still accommodates deprecated older QuantLib versions if needed (up to QuantLib 1.25)

The configure script now uses PKG_CXXFLAGS and PKG_LIBS internally, and shows the values it sets

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

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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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Tue, 23 Jul 2024

RQuantLib 0.4.23 on CRAN: Updates

A new minor release 0.4.23 of RQuantLib just arrived at CRAN earlier today, and will be uploaded to Debian in due course.

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

This release of RQuantLib updates to QuantLib version 1.35 released this morning. It accommodates some removals following earlier deprecations, and also updates most of the code in the function for a more readable and compact form of creating shared pointers via make_shared() along with auto.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.23 (2024-07-23)

Adjustments for QuantLib 1.35 and removal of deprecated code (in utility functions and dividend case of vanilla options)

Adjustments for new changes in QuantLib 1.35

Refactoring most C++ files making more use of both auto and make_shared to simplify and shorten expressions

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.

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qlcal 0.0.12 on CRAN: Calendar Updates

The twelveth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.

This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.35 (made today) and contains more updates to 2024 calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.12 (2024-07-22)

Synchronized with QuantLib 1.35 released today

Calendar updates for Chile, India, United States, Brazil

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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Fri, 19 Jul 2024

dtts 0.1.3 on CRAN: More Maintenance

Leonardo and I are happy to announce the release of another maintenance release 0.1.3 of our dtts package which has been on CRAN for a good two years now.

dtts builds upon our nanotime package as well as the beloved data.table to bring high-performance and high-resolution indexing at the nanosecond level to data frames. dtts aims to offers the time-series indexing versatility of xts (and zoo) to the immense power of data.table while supporting highest nanosecond resolution.

This release contains two nice and focussed contributed pull requests. Tomas Kalibera, who as part of R Core looks after everything concerning R on Windows, and then some, needed an adjustment for pending / upcoming R on Windows changes for builds with LLVM which is what Arm-on-Windows uses. We happily obliged: neither Leonardo nor I see much of Windows these decades. (Easy thing to say on a day like today with its crowdstrike hammer falling!) Similarly, Michael Chirico supplied a PR updating one of our tests to an upcoming change at data.table which we are of course happy to support.

The short list of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.1.3 (2024-07-18)

Windows builds use localtime_s with LLVM (Tomas Kalibera in #16)

Tests code has been adjusted for an upstream change in data.table tests for all.equal (Michael Chirico in #18 addressing #17)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a report with diffstat for this release. Questions, comments, issue tickets can be brought to 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/dtts | permanent link

Wed, 17 Jul 2024

Rcpp 1.0.13 on CRAN: Some Updates

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)

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.

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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

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.

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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

Sat, 06 Jul 2024

binb 0.0.7 on CRAN: Maintenance

The seventh release of the binb package, and first in four years, is now on CRAN. binb regroups four rather nice themes for writing LaTeX Beamer presentations much more easily in (R)Markdown. As a teaser, a quick demo combining all four themes is available; documentation and examples are in the package.

This release contains a CRAN-requested fix for a just-released new pandoc version which deals differently with overflowing bounding boxes from graphics; an added new LaTeX command is needed. We also polished continuous integration and related internals a few times but this does not contain directly user-facing changes in the package.

Changes in binb version 0.0.7 (2024-07-06)

Several rounds of small updates to ge continuous integration setup.

An additional LaTeX command needed by pandoc (>= 3.2.1) has been added.

CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments, 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.

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Mon, 24 Jun 2024

x13binary 1.1.61 on CRAN: Maintenance

The x13binary team is thrilled to share the availability of Release 1.1.61 of the x13binary package providing the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau which arrived on CRAN earlier today.

This release brings two updates suggested by the tireless CRAN maintainers. Kurt Hornik suggested to now also ignore stderr when calling the x13 binary via system: it appears that builds under the new-ish and clang-based flang-new now emit on stderr even if Fortran-based binaries did not before. So we adjust. And Brian Ripley pointed out that our Makefile for creating the x13 binary was not quite as is should be, which we adjusted. And I just realized I should have named this 1.1.60-2 to follow the upstream convention but didn’t. Next time.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release showing changes 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/x13binary | permanent link

Sun, 23 Jun 2024

digest 0.6.36 on CRAN: Big endian, maintenance

Release 0.6.36 of the digest package arrived at CRAN today and has also been uploaded to Debian.

digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects. It can use a number different hashing algorithms (md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, blake3,crc32c, xxh3_64 and xxh3_128), and enables easy comparison of (potentially large and nested) R language objects as it relies on the native serialization in R. It is a mature and widely-used package (with 69.1 million downloads just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various objects.

This release updates one contributed C++ function to be compliant with R’s revent preference for explicit declaration of REMAP, and improves the behavior under the (increasingly rare) ‘big endian’ system via a patch to blake3 as well as a hint that spookyhash under ‘big endian’ may not meed its reference output from ‘little endian’.

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/digest | permanent link

Fri, 21 Jun 2024

nanotime 0.3.9 on CRAN: Bugfix

A quick bug fix release 0.3.9 for our nanotime package is now on CRAN, following up on the 0.3.8 release made this week. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, using the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations.

The 0.3.8 release added a accurate parameter for POSIXct conversions, and it turns out that this did not test as expected on arm64 so we disabled the test on that platform. The NEWS snippet below has the full details.

Changes in version 0.3.9 (2024-06-21)

Condition two tests to not run on arm64 (Dirk in #129 fixing #128)

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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Wed, 19 Jun 2024

nanotime 0.3.8 on CRAN: More Maintenance

Leonardo and I are happy to annunce that a new version 0.3.8 of our nanotime package arrived on CRAN today. It is the first release in over 1 1/2 years. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, using the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations.

This release responds to a number of enhancements including a new paramter accurate for POSIXct to nanotime conversions, a vector date converter, a switch to double return value when durations objects are dividded – as well as a small battery of CRAN requests for changes and updates. This started with a move away from the now ‘non-API’ function SET_S4_OBJECT which has been replaced by use of Rf_asS4. We also no longer need a custom compiler flag on Windows (where for some reasons nobody understands or remembers, bitfields are not packed) to small enhancements of manual page formatting and last-but-not-least avoidance of some new UBSAN warnings. The NEWS snippet has the full details.

Changes in version 0.3.8 (2024-06-19)

Time format documentation now has a reference to RcppCCTZ

The package no longer sets a default C++ compilation standard of C++11 (Dirk initially in #114, and later switched to C++17)

New accurate parameter for conversion from POSIXct to nanotime (Davor Josipovic and Leonardo in #116 closing #115)

The as.Date() function is now vectorized and can take a TZ argument (Leonardo and Dirk in #119 closing #118)

Use of internal function SET_S4_OBJECT has been replaced by API function Rf_asS4 (Leonardo in #121 closing #120)

An nanoduration / nanoduration expression now returns a double (Leonardo in #122 closing #117)

Bitfield calculations no longer require an Windows-only compiler switch (Leonardo in #124)

A simple manual page format nag involving has been addressed (Dirk in #126 fixing #125)

An set of tests tickling an UBSAN issue via Rcpp code no longer run unless CI is set (Dirk in #127 fixing #123)

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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Tue, 04 Jun 2024

ulid 0.4.0 on CRAN: Extended to Milliseconds

A new version of the ulid package is now on CRAN. The packages provides ‘universally (unique) lexicographically (sortable) identifiers’ – see the spec at GitHub for details on those – which offer sorting which uuids lack. The R package provides access via the standard C++ library, had been put together by Bob Rudis and is now maintained by me.

Mark Heckmann noticed that a ulid round trip of generating and unmarshalling swallowed subsecond informationm and posted on a well-known site I no longer go to. Duncan Murdoch was kind enough to open an issue to make me aware, and in it included the nice minimally complete verifiable example by Mark.

It turns out that this issue was known, documented upstream in two issues and fixed in fork by the authors of those issues, Chris Bove. It replaces time_t as the value of record (constrained at the second resolution) with a proper std::chrono object which offers milliseconds (and much more, yay Modern C++). So I switched the two main files of library to his, and updated the wrapper code to interface from POSIXct to std::chrono object. And with that we are in business. The original example of five ulids create 100 millisecond part, then unmarshalled and here printed as a data.table as data.frame by default truncates to seconds:

> library(ulid)
> gen_ulid <- \(sleep) replicate(5, {Sys.sleep(sleep); generate()})
> u <- gen_ulid(.1)
> df <- unmarshal(u)
> data.table::data.table(df)
                        ts              rnd
                    <POSc>           <char>
1: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.588 CSQAJBPNX75R0G5A
2: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.688 XZX0TREDHD6PC1YR
3: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.789 0YK9GKZVTED27QMK
4: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.890 SC3M3G6KGPH7S50S
5: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.990 TSKCBWJ3TEKCPBY0
>

We updated the documentation accordingly, and added some new tests as well. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.4.0 (2024-06-03)

Switch two functions to fork by Chris Bove using std::chrono instead of time_t for consistent millisecond resolution (#3 fixing #2)

Updated documentation showing consistent millisecond functionality

Added unit tests for millisecond functionality

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.

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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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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Tue, 14 May 2024

RApiSerialize 0.1.3 on CRAN: Skipping XDR

A new bug fix release 0.1.3 of RApiSerialize got onto CRAN earlier today. This is the first release in well over a year, and permits the skip the XDR serialization format which is needed when transfering between big- and little-endian machines. But it comes at a certain run-time cost one can avoid on the (much more common) little-endian machines. This is a new option, and the old behavior is the default. Those who want to can now skip the step.

The RApiSerialize package is used by both my RcppRedis as well as by Travers excellent qs package. We also addressed the recent nag by the CRAN concerning ‘NO_REMAP’.

Changes in version 0.1.3 (2024-05-13)

Add an xdr argument to disable XDR for an approx. threefold speed increase (Travers Ching and Dirk in #6)

Use R_NO_REMAP and Rf_* prefix for API calls

Minor continuous integration updates

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More details are at the RApiSerialize page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository rapiserializerepo.

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.

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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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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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

Sat, 27 Apr 2024

qlcal 0.0.11 on CRAN: Calendar Updates

The eleventh release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.

This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.34 and contains more updates to 2024 calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.11 (2024-04-27)

Synchronized with QuantLib 1.34

Calendar updates for Brazil, India, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, United States

Minor continuous integration update

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/qlcal | 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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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Thu, 25 Apr 2024

RQuantLib 0.4.22 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new minor release 0.4.22 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian.

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

This release of RQuantLib updates to QuantLib version 1.34 which was just released yesterday, and deprecates use of an access point / type for price/yield conversion for bonds. We also made two minor earlier changes.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.22 (2024-04-25)

Small code cleanup removing duplicate R code

Small improvements to C++ compilation flags

Robustify internal version comparison to accommodate RC releases

Adjustments to two C++ files for QuantLib 1.34

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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/rquantlib | permanent link

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

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

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, 02 Apr 2024

ulid 0.3.1 on CRAN: New Maintainer, Some Polish

Happy to share that ulid is now (back) on CRAN. It provides universally unique identifiers that are lexicographically sortable, which improves over the more well-known uuid generators.

ulid is a neat little package put together by Bob Rudis a few years ago. It had recently drifted off CRAN so I offered to brush it up and re-submit it. And as tooted earlier today, it took just over an hour to finish that (after the lead up work I had done, including prior email with CRAN in the loop, the repo transfer from Bob’s to my ulid repo plus of course a wee bit of actual maintenance; see below for more).

The NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.3.1 (2024-04-02)

New Maintainer

Deleted several repository files no longer used or needed

Added .editorconfig, ChangeLog and cleanup

Converted NEWS.md to NEWS.Rd

Simplified R/ directory to one source file

Simplified src/ removing redundant Makevars

Added ulid() alias

Updated / edited roxygen and README.md documention

Removed vignette which was identical to README.md

Switched continuous integration to GitHub Actions

Placed upstream (header-only) library into src/ulid/

Renamed single interface file to src/wrapper

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/ulid | permanent link

Sat, 23 Mar 2024

littler 0.3.20 on CRAN: Moar Features!

max-heap image

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

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

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

This release contains another fair number of small changes and improvements to some of the scripts I use daily to build or test packages, adds a new front-end ciw.r for the recently-released ciw package offering a ‘CRAN Incoming Watcher’, a new helper installDeps2.r (extending installDeps.r), a new doi-to-bib converter, allows a different temporary directory setup I find helpful, deals with one corner deployment use, and more.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.20 (2024-03-23)

Changes in examples scripts

New (dependency-free) helper installDeps2.r to install dependencies

Scripts rcc.r, tt.r, tttf.r, tttlr.r use env argument -S to set -t to r

tt.r can now fill in inst/tinytest if it is present

New script ciw.r wrapping new package ciw

tttf.t can now use devtools and its loadall

New script doi2bib.r to call the DOI converter REST service (following a skeet by Richard McElreath)

Changes in package

The CI setup uses checkout@v4 and the r-ci-setup action

The Suggests: is a little tighter as we do not list all packages optionally used in the the examples (as R does not check for it either)

The package load messag can account for the rare build of R under different architecture (Berwin Turlach in #117 closing #116)

In non-vanilla mode, the temporary directory initialization in re-run allowing for a non-standard temp dir via config settings

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

Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

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/littler | permanent link

Wed, 20 Mar 2024

ciw 0.0.2 on CRAN: Updates

A first revision of the still only one-week old (at CRAN) package ciw has been released to CRAN! It provides is a single (efficient) function incoming() (now along with an alias ciw()) which summarises the state of the incoming directories at CRAN. I happen to like having these things at my (shell) fingertips, so it goes along with (still draft) wrapper ciw.r that will be part of the next littler release.

For example, when I do this right now as I type this, I see (typically less than one second later)

edd@rob:~$ ciw.r 
    Folder                     Name                Time   Size         Age
    <char>                   <char>              <POSc> <char>  <difftime>
1: pretest instantiate_0.2.2.tar.gz 2024-03-20 13:29:00    17K  0.07 hours
2: recheck   tinytable_0.2.0.tar.gz 2024-03-20 12:50:00   565K  0.72 hours
3: pending      Matrix_1.7-0.tar.gz 2024-03-20 12:05:00   2.3M  1.47 hours
4: recheck      survey_4.4-2.tar.gz 2024-03-20 02:02:00   2.2M 11.52 hours
5: waiting   equateIRT_2.4.0.tar.gz 2024-03-19 17:00:00   895K 20.55 hours
6: pending   ravetools_0.1.5.tar.gz 2024-03-19 12:06:00   1.0M 25.45 hours
7: waiting     glmmTMB_1.1.9.tar.gz 2024-03-18 16:04:00   4.2M 45.48 hours
edd@rob:~$

See ciw.r --help or ciw.r --usage for more. Alternatively, in your R session, you can call ciw::incoming() (or now ciw::ciw()) for the same result (and/or load the package first).

This release adds some packaging touches, brings the new alias ciw() as well as a state variable with all (known) folder names and some internal improvements for dealing with error conditions. The NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2024-03-20)

The package README and DESCRIPTION have been expanded

An alias ciw can now be used for incoming

Network error handling is now more robist

A state variable known_folders lists all CRAN folders below incoming

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/ciw | permanent link

Wed, 13 Mar 2024

ciw 0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package!

Happy to share that ciw is now on CRAN! I had tooted a little bit about it, e.g., here. What it provides is a single (efficient) function incoming() which summarises the state of the incoming directories at CRAN. I happen to like having these things at my (shell) fingertips, so it goes along with (still draft) wrapper ciw.r that will be part of the next littler release.

For example, when I do this right now as I type this, I see

edd@rob:~$ ciw.r
    Folder                   Name                Time   Size          Age
    <char>                 <char>              <POSc> <char>   <difftime>
1: waiting   maximin_1.0-5.tar.gz 2024-03-13 22:22:00    20K   2.48 hours
2: inspect    GofCens_0.97.tar.gz 2024-03-13 21:12:00    29K   3.65 hours
3: inspect verbalisr_0.5.2.tar.gz 2024-03-13 20:09:00    79K   4.70 hours
4: waiting    rnames_1.0.1.tar.gz 2024-03-12 15:04:00   2.7K  33.78 hours
5: waiting  PCMBase_1.2.14.tar.gz 2024-03-10 12:32:00   406K  84.32 hours
6: pending        MPCR_1.1.tar.gz 2024-02-22 11:07:00   903K 493.73 hours
edd@rob:~$

which is rather compact as CRAN kept busy! This call runs in about (or just over) one second, which includes launching r. Good enough for me. From a well-connected EC2 instance it is about 800ms on the command-line. When I do I from here inside an R session it is maybe 700ms. And doing it over in Europe is faster still. (I am using ping=FALSE for these to omit the default sanity check of ‘can I haz networking?’ to speed things up. The check adds another 200ms or so.)

The function (and the wrapper) offer a ton of options too this is ridiculously easy to do thanks to the docopt package:

edd@rob:~$ ciw.r -x
Usage: ciw.r [-h] [-x] [-a] [-m] [-i] [-t] [-p] [-w] [-r] [-s] [-n] [-u] [-l rows] [-z] [ARG...]

-m --mega           use 'mega' mode of all folders (see --usage)
-i --inspect        visit 'inspect' folder
-t --pretest        visit 'pretest' folder
-p --pending        visit 'pending' folder
-w --waiting        visit 'waiting' folder
-r --recheck        visit 'waiting' folder
-a --archive        visit 'archive' folder
-n --newbies        visit 'newbies' folder
-u --publish        visit 'publish' folder
-s --skipsort       skip sorting of aggregate results by age
-l --lines rows     print top 'rows' of the result object [default: 50]
-z --ping           run the connectivity check first
-h --help           show this help text
-x --usage          show help and short example usage 

where ARG... can be one or more file name, or directories or package names.

Examples:
  ciw.r -ip                            # run in 'inspect' and 'pending' mode
  ciw.r -a                             # run with mode 'auto' resolved in incoming()
  ciw.r                                # run with defaults, same as '-itpwr'

When no argument is given, 'auto' is selected which corresponds to 'inspect', 'waiting',
'pending', 'pretest', and 'recheck'. Selecting '-m' or '--mega' are select as default.

Folder selecting arguments are cumulative; but 'mega' is a single selections of all folders
(i.e. 'inspect', 'waiting', 'pending', 'pretest', 'recheck', 'archive', 'newbies', 'publish').

ciw.r is part of littler which brings 'r' to the command-line.
See https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/littler.html for more information.
edd@rob:~$

The README at the git repo and the CRAN page offer a ‘screenshot movie’ showing some of the options in action.

I have been using the little tools quite a bit over the last two or three weeks since I first put it together and find it quite handy. With that again a big Thank You! of appcreciation for all that CRAN does—which this week included letting this past the newbies desk in under 24 hours.

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/ciw | permanent link

Mon, 11 Mar 2024

digest 0.6.35 on CRAN: New xxhash code

Release 0.6.35 of the digest package arrived at CRAN today and has also been uploaded to Debian already.

digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects. It can use a number different hashing algorithms (md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, blake3,crc32c – and now also xxh3_64 and xxh3_128), and enables easy comparison of (potentially large and nested) R language objects as it relies on the native serialization in R. It is a mature and widely-used package (with 65.8 million downloads just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various objects.

This release updates the included xxHash version to the current verion 0.8.2 updating the existing xxhash32 and xxhash64 hash functions — and also adding the newer xxh3_64 and xxh3_128 ones. We have a project at work using xxh3_128 from Python which made me realize having it from R would be nice too, and given the existing infrastructure in the package actually doing so was fairly quick and straightforward.

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/digest | permanent link

Thu, 07 Mar 2024

prrd 0.0.6 at CRAN: Several Improvements

Thrilled to share that a new version of prrd arrived at CRAN yesterday in a first update in two and a half years. prrd facilitates the parallel running [of] reverse dependency [checks] when preparing R packages. It is used extensively for releases I make of Rcpp, RcppArmadillo, RcppEigen, BH, and others.

prrd screenshot image

The key idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development that is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the (dated) screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in a split byobu session).

This release, the first since 2021, brings a number of enhancments. In particular, the summary function is now improved in several ways. Josh also put in a nice PR that generalizes some setup defaults and values.

The release is summarised in the NEWS entry:

Changes in prrd version 0.0.6 (2024-03-06)

The summary function has received several enhancements:

Extended summary is only running when failures are seen.

The summariseQueue function now displays an anticipated completion time and remaining duration.

The use of optional package foghorn has been refined, and refactored, when running summaries.

The dequeueJobs.r scripts can receive a date argument, the date can be parse via anydate if anytime ins present.

The enqueeJobs.r now considers skipped package when running 'addfailed' while ensuring selecting packages are still on CRAN.

The CI setup has been updated (twice),

Enqueing and dequing functions and scripts now support relative directories, updated documentation (#18 by Joshua Ulrich).

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/prrd | permanent link

Mon, 04 Mar 2024

tinythemes 0.0.2 at CRAN: Maintenance

A first maintenance of the still fairly new package tinythemes arrived on CRAN today. tinythemes provides the theme_ipsum_rc() function from hrbrthemes by Bob Rudis in a zero (added) dependency way. A simple example is (also available as a demo inside the package) contrasts the default style (on left) with the one added by this package (on the right):

This version mostly just updates to the newest releases of ggplot2 as one must, and takes advantage of Bob’s update to hrbrthemes yesterday.

The full set of changes since the initial CRAN release follows.

Changes in spdl version 0.0.2 (2024-03-04)

Added continuous integrations action based on r2u

Added demo/ directory and a READNE.md

Minor edits to help page content

Synchronised with ggplot2 3.5.0 via hrbrthemes

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the repo where comments and suggestions are welcome.

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/tinythemes | 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

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)

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, 01 Feb 2024

RQuantLib 0.4.21 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new minor release 0.4.21 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN this afternoon, and has already been uploaded to Debian as well.

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

This release of RQuantLib benefits from some kind attention that Jeroen has been paying to how we build (especially at CRAN) on both macOS and Windows. So the build processes are a little better now, and no internal code changed. QuantLib 1.33 built unchanged.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.21 (2024-02-01)

Generalize macOS build to universal build (Jeroen in #179)

Generalize Windows build to arm64 (Jeroen in #181)

Generalize version string use to support cmake use (Jeroen in #181 fixing #180)

Minor update to 'ci.yaml' github action (Dirk)

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/code/rquantlib | permanent link

Wed, 31 Jan 2024

dtts 0.1.2 on CRAN: Maintenance

Leonardo and I are happy to announce the release of a very minor maintenance release 0.1.2 of our dtts package which has been on CRAN for a little under two years now.

This release follows yesterday’s long-awaited release of data.table version 1.5.0 which had been some time in the making as the first new major.minor release since Matt drifted into being less active and the forefront. The release also renamed the one C-level API accessor to data.table (which was added, if memory serves, by Leonardo with our use in mind). So we have to catch up to the renamed identifier; this release does that, and adds a versioned imports statement on data.table.

The short list of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.1.2 (2024-01-31)

Update the one exported C-level identifier from data.table following its 1.5.0 release and a renaming

Routine continuous integration updates

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a report with diffstat for this release. Questions, comments, issue tickets can be brought to 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/dtts | permanent link

Wed, 24 Jan 2024

qlcal 0.0.10 on CRAN: Calendar Updates

The tenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.

This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.33 and its updates to 2024 calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.10 (2024-01-24)

Synchronized with QuantLib 1.33

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples.

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/qlcal | permanent link

RApiDatetime 0.0.9 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new maintenance release of our RApiDatetime package is now on CRAN

RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly, asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions are rather useful, but were not previously exported by R for C-level use by other packages. Which this package aims to change.

This release responds to a CRAN request to clean up empty macros and sections in Rd files. Moreover, because the windows portion of the corresponding R-internal code underwent some changes, our (#ifdef conditional) coverage here is a little behind and created a warning under the newer UCRT setup. So starting with this release we are back to OS_type: unix meaning there will not be any Windows builds at CRAN. If you would like that to change, and ideally can work in the Windows portion, do not hesitate to get in touch.

Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in RApiDatetime version 0.0.9 (2024-01-23)

Replace auto-generated stale RApitDatetime-package.Rd with macro-filled stanza 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/rapidatetime | 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

Mon, 22 Jan 2024

x13binary 1.1.60 on CRAN: Upstream Update, Updated Build

The x13binary team is thrilled to share the availability of Release 1.1.60-1 of the x13binary package providing the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau which arrived on CRAN earlier today.

This release brings the package up to speed with the most current release by the Census Bureau. More importantly, we finally made good on an old promise to ourselves and now install the binary by compiling from its Fortran sources! No more pre-made binaries. This required some work by Kirill, Michael, and Jeroen to finalize matter because, as we all know, the CRAN build processes and tool chains can be a little byzantine in their details. Use on platforms not covered by binaries from CRAN (or r-universe) should just work too as the demands on the (Fortran) compiler are fairly standard. All in all the build is fairly lightweight and quick even when rebuilding from source.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release showing changes 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/x13binary | permanent link

Sun, 21 Jan 2024

RProtoBuf 0.4.22 on CRAN: Updated Windows Support!

A new maintenance release 0.4.22 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.

This release matches the recent 0.4.21 release which enabled use of the package with newer ProtoBuf releases. Tomas has been updating the Windows / rtools side of things, and supplied us with simple PR that will enable building with those updated versions once finalised.

The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has full details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.22 (2022-12-13)

Apply patch by Tomas Kalibera to support updated rtools to build with newer ProtoBuf releases on windows

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the ‘quick’ overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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/rprotobuf | permanent link