Thinking inside the box

Thu, 23 Jan 2025

qlcal 0.0.14 on CRAN: Calendar Updates

The fourteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today, following the QuantLib 1.37 release two days ago.

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 1.37 (made this week), and moves a demo/ file to examples/.

Changes in version 0.0.14 (2025-01-23)

Synchronized with QuantLib 1.37 released two days ago

Calendar updates for United States and New Zealand

The demo/ file is now in inst/examples/

This update includes the inclusion of the January 9, 2025, holiday for the memorial of President Carter that was observed at the NYSE and shown by the allUScalendars.R example:

edd@rob:~/git/qlcal-r/inst/examples(master)$ Rscript allUScalendars.R 
           LiborImpact NYSE GovernmentBond NERC FederalReserve SOFR
2025-01-01        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2025-01-09          NA TRUE             NA   NA             NA   NA
2025-01-20        TRUE TRUE           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2025-02-17        TRUE TRUE           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2025-04-18          NA TRUE           TRUE   NA             NA TRUE
2025-05-26        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2025-06-19        TRUE TRUE           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2025-07-04        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2025-09-01        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2025-10-13        TRUE   NA           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2025-11-11        TRUE   NA           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2025-11-27        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2025-12-25        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
edd@rob:~/git/qlcal-r/inst/examples(master)$

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

Tue, 21 Jan 2025

ttdo 0.0.10 on CRAN: Small Extension

A new minor release of our ttdo package arrived on CRAN a few days ago. The ttdo package extends the excellent (and very minimal / zero depends) unit testing package tinytest by Mark van der Loo with the very clever and well-done diffobj package by Brodie Gaslam to give us test results with visual diffs (as shown in the screenshot below) which seemingly is so compelling an idea that it eventually got copied by another package which shall remain unnamed… And as of this release, we also support visual diffs as provided by tinysnapshot by Vincent Arel-Bundock.

ttdo screenshot

This release chiefly adds support for visual diff plots. As we extend tinytest for use in the R autograder we maintain and deploy within the lovely PrairieLearn framework, we need to encode the diffplot that has been produced by the autograder (commonly in a separate Docker process) to communicate it back to the controlling (Docker also) instance of PrairieLearn. We also did the usual bits of package maintenance keeping badges, URLs, continuous integration and minor R coding standards current.

As usual, the NEWS entry follows.

Changes in ttdo version 0.0.10 (2025-01-21)

Regular packaging updates to badges and continuous integration setup

Add support for a 'visual difference' taking advantage of a tinysnapshot feature returning a ttvd-typed result

Added (versioned) dependency on tinysnapshot (to also get the plot 'style' enhancement in the most recent version) and base64enc

Return ttdo-typed result if diffobj-printed result is returned

Ensure all package-documentation links in manual page have anchors to the package

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/ttdo | permanent link

Sun, 19 Jan 2025

RcppMsgPack 0.2.4 on CRAN: Maintenance

Another maintenance release of RcppMsgPack got onto CRAN today. MessagePack itself is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it is faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves. RcppMsgPack brings both the C++ headers of MessagePack as well as clever code (in both R and C++) Travers wrote to access MsgPack-encoded objects directly from R.

This is the first release in over six years, and contains mostly maintenance. One somewhat embarassing aspect is that Travers and I forgot about a PR that had been ready all this since the last release, it has now been integrated. Details follow from the NEWS file.

Changes in version 0.2.4 (2025-01-19)

Use Rcpp::RawVector instead of std::vector<unsigned char> saving extra copy (Travers in #16)

Several updates to README.md with R Journal paper, add badges, add Authors@R, add CITATION file, add repo info to DESCRIPTION

Update continuous integration via r-ci

Update to no longer require compilation standard

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the [issue tracker][issue tickets] at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 15 Jan 2025

RcppFastFloat 0.0.5 on CRAN: New Upstream, Updates

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

This release updates the underlying fast_float library version to the current version 7.0.0, and updates a few packaging aspects.

Changes in version 0.0.5 (2025-01-15)

No longer set a compilation standard

Updates to continuous integration, badges, URLs, DESCRIPTION

Update to fast_float 7.0.0

Per CRAN Policy comment-out compiler 'diagnostic ignore' instances

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the [issue tracker][issue tickets] at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 14 Jan 2025

RProtoBuf 0.4.23 on CRAN: Mulitple Updates

A new maintenance release 0.4.23 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today, about one year after the previous update. 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 brings a number of contributed PRs which are truly appreciate. As the package dates back fifteen+ years, some code corners can be crufty which was addressed in several PRs, as were two updates for ongoing changes / new releases of ProtoBuf itself. I also made the usual changes one does to continuous integrations, README badges and URL as well as correcting one issue the checkbashism script complained about.

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

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.23 (2022-12-13)

More robust tests using toTextFormat() (Xufei Tan in #99 addressing #98)

Various standard packaging updates to CI and badges (Dirk)

Improvements to string construction in error messages (Michael Chirico in #102 and #103)

Accommodate ProtoBuf 26.x and later (Matteo Gianella in #104)

Accommodate ProtoBuf 6.30.9 and later (Lev Kandel in #106)

Correct bashism issues in configure.ac (Dirk)

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.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/rprotobuf | permanent link

Sun, 12 Jan 2025

Rcpp 1.0.14 on CRAN: Regular Semi-Annual Update

The Rcpp Core Team is once again thrilled, pleased, and chuffed (am I doing this right for LinkedIn?) to announce a new release (now at 1.0.14) 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 only uploaded yesterday, and as always get flagged because of the grandfathered .Call(symbol) as well as for the url to the Rcpp book (which has remained unchanged for years) ‘failing’. My email reply was promptly dealt with under European morning hours and by the time I got up the submission was in state ‘waiting’ over a single reverse-dependency failure which … is also spurious, appears on some systems and not others, and also not new. Imagine that: nearly 3000 reverse dependencies and only one (spurious) change to worse. Solid testing seems to help. My thanks as always to the CRAN for responding promptly.

This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. This time we also need a one-off hotfix release 1.0.13-1: we had (accidentally) conditioned an upcoming R change on 4.5.0, but it already came with 4.4.2 so we needed to adjust our code. 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, 2977 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. On CRAN, 13.6% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 60.8% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 93.7 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1947 (JSS, 2011) and 354 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 676.

This release is primarily 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 once again to a few changes; Kevin did once again did most of these PRs. Other contributed PRs include Gábor permitting builds on yet another BSD variant, Simon Guest correcting sourceCpp() to work on read-only files, Marco Colombo correcting a (surprisingly large) number of vignette typos, Iñaki rebuilding some documentation files that tickled (false) alerts, and I took care of a number of other maintenance items along the way.

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 1.0.14 (2025-01-11)

Changes in Rcpp API:

Support for user-defined databases has been removed (Kevin in #1314 fixing #1313)

The SET_TYPEOF function and macro is no longer used (Kevin in #1315 fixing #1312)

An errorneous cast to int affecting large return object has been removed (Dirk in #1335 fixing #1334)

Compilation on DragonFlyBSD is now supported (Gábor Csárdi in #1338)

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 Attributes:

The sourceCpp() function can now handle input files with read-only modes (Simon Guest in #1346 fixing #1345)

Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

One unit tests for arm64 macOS has been adjusted; a macOS continuous integration runner was added (Dirk in #1324)

Authors@R is now used in DESCRIPTION as mandated by CRAN, the Rcpp.package.skeleton() function also creates it (Dirk in #1325 and #1327)

A single datetime format test has been adjusted to match a change in R-devel (Dirk in #1348 fixing #1347)

Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

The Rcpp Modules vignette was extended slightly following #1322 (Dirk)

Pdf vignettes have been regenerated under Ghostscript 10.03.1 to avoid a false positive by a Windows virus scanner (Iñaki in #1331)

A (large) number of (old) typos have been corrected in the vignettes (Marco Colombo in #1344)

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).

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/rcpp | permanent link

Fri, 10 Jan 2025

nanotime 0.3.11 on CRAN: Polish

Another minor update 0.3.11 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 covers two corner case. Michael sent in a PR avoiding a clang warning on complex types. We fixed an issue that surfaced in a downstream package under sanitizier checks: R extends coverage of NA to types such as integer or character which need special treatment in non-R library code as ‘they do not know’. We flagged (character) formatted values after we had called the corresponding CCTZ function but that leaves potentiall ‘undefined’ values (from R’s NA values for int, say, cast to double) so now we flag them, set a transient safe value for the call and inject the (character) representation "NA" after the call in those spots. End result is the same, but without a possibly slap on the wrist from sanitizer checks.

The NEWS snippet below has the full details.

Changes in version 0.3.11 (2025-01-10)

Explicit Rcomplex assignment accommodates pickier compilers over newer R struct (Michael Chirico in #135 fixing #134)

When formatting, NA are flagged before CCTZ call to to not trigger santizier, and set to NA after call (Dirk in #136)

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.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/nanotime | permanent link

Thu, 09 Jan 2025

inline 0.3.21: Minor Polish

A fresh minor release of the inline package got to CRAN today, following on the November release which had marked 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.

In the November release we accommodated upcoming R-devel changes on setting R_NO_REMAP by conditioning on the release version. It turns that this does not get when the #define independently so this needed a small refinement which this version brings. No other changes were made.

The NEWS extract follows and details the changes some more.

Changes in inline version 0.3.21 (2025-01-08)

Refine use of Rf_warning in cfunction setting -DR_NO_REMAP ourselves to get R version independent state

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).

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/inline | permanent link

Wed, 08 Jan 2025

RcppGetconf 0.0.4 on CRAN: Updates

A minor package update, the first in over six years, for the RcppGetconf package for reading system configuration — not unlike getconf from the libc library — is now on CRAN

The changes are all minor package maintenance items of keeping URLs, continuous integration, and best practices current. We had two helper scripts use bash in their shebangs, and we just got dinged in one of them. Tedious as this can at times seem, it ensures CRAN packages do in fact compile just about anywhere which is a Good Thing (TM) so we obliged and updated the package with that change—and all the others that had accumulated over six years. No interface or behaviour changes, “just maintenance” as one does at times.

The short list of changes in this release follows:

Changes in inline version 0.0.4 (2025-01-07)

Dynamically linked compiled code is now registered in NAMESPACE

The continuous integration setup was update several times

The README was updated with current badges and URLs

The DESCRIPTION file now uses Authors@R

The configure and cleanup scripts use /bin/sh

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report of changes relative to the previous release. More about the package is at the local RcppGetconf page and the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/rcpp | permanent link

Sat, 21 Dec 2024

anytime 0.3.11 on CRAN: Maintenance

A follow-up release 0.3.11 to the recent 0.3.10 release release of the anytime package arrived on CRAN two days ago. The package is fairly feature-complete, and code and functionality remain mature and stable, of course.

anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … input format to either POSIXct (when called as anytime) or Date objects (when called as anydate) – and to do so without requiring a format string as well as accomodating different formats in one input vector. See the anytime page, or the GitHub repo for a few examples, and the beautiful documentation site for all documentation.

This release simply skips one test file. CRAN labeled an error ‘M1mac’ yet it did not reproduce on any of the other M1 macOS I can access (macbuilder, GitHub Actions) as this appeared related to a local setting of timezone values I could not reproduce anywwhere. So the only way to get rid of the ‘fail’ is to … not to run the test. Needless to say the upload process was a little tedious as I got the passive-aggressive ‘not responding’ treatment on a first upload and the required email answer it lead to. Anyway, after a few days, and even more deep breaths, it is taken care of and now the package result standing is (at least currently) pristinely clean.

The short list of changes follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.11 (2024-12-18)

Skip a test file

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report of changes relative to the previous release. The issue tracker tracker off the GitHub repo can be use for questions and comments. More information about the package is at the package page, the GitHub repo and the documentation site.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/anytime | permanent link

Tue, 17 Dec 2024

BH 1.87.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream

Boost

Boost is a very large and comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming language, containing well over one hundred individual libraries. The BH package provides a sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking required) use by R. It is fairly widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud mirrors) show over 38.5 million package downloads.

Version 1.87.0 of Boost was released last week following the regular Boost release schedule of April, August and December releases. As before, we packaged it almost immediately and started testing following our annual update cycle which strives to balance being close enough to upstream and not stressing CRAN and the user base too much. The reverse depends check revealed six packages requiring changes or adjustments. We opened issue #103 to coordinate the issue (just as we did in previous years). Our sincere thanks to Matt Fidler who fixed two packages pretty much immediately.

As I had not heard back from the other maintainers since filing the issue, I uploaded the package to CRAN suggesting that the coming winter break may be a good opportunity for the four other packages to catch up. CRAN concurred, and 1.87.0-1 is now available there.

There are no other changes apart from cosmetics in the DESCRIPTION file. For once, we did not add any new Boost libraries. The short NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 1.87.0-1 (2024-12-17)

Upgrade to Boost 1.87.0, patched as usual to comment-out diagnostic suppression messages per the request of CRAN

Switched to Authors@R

Via my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to the previous release. Comments and suggestions about BH are welcome via the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/bh | permanent link

Mon, 16 Dec 2024

#45: Some r-ci Updates

market monitor

Welcome to post 45 in the $R^4 series!

We introduced r-ci here in post #32 here nearly four years ago. It has found pretty widespread use and adoption, and we received a few kind words then (in the linked issue) and also more recently (in a follow-up comment) from which we merrily quote:

[…] almost 3 years later on and I have had zero problems with this CI setup. For people who want reliable R software, resources like these are invaluable.

And while we followed up with post #41 about r2u for simple continuous integration, we may not have posted when we based r-ci on r2u (for the obvious Linux usage case). So let’s make time now for a (comparitively smaller) update, and an update usage examples.

We made two changes in the last few days. One is a (obvious in hindsight) simplification. Given that the bootstrap step was always executed, and needed no parameters, we pulled it into a new aggregated setup simply called r-ci that includes it so that it can be omitted as a step in the yaml file. Second, we recently needed Fortran on macOS too, and realized it was not installed by default so we just added that too.

With that a real and used example is now as simple as the screenshot to the left (and hence one ‘paragraph’ shorter). The trained eye will no doubt observe that there is nothing specific to a given repo. And that is basically the key feature: we can simply copy this file around and get fast and easy and reliable CI by taking advantage of the underlying robustness of r2u solving all dependency automagically and reliably. The option to enable macOS is also solid and compelling as the GitHub runners are fast (but more ‘expensive’ in how the count against the limit of minutes—so again a tradeoff to make), as is the option to run coverage if one so desires. Some of my repos do too.

Take a look at the r-ci website which has more examples for the other supported CI servics it can used with, and feel free to ask questions as issue in the repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/r4 | permanent link

Thu, 12 Dec 2024

#44: r2u For ML and MLops Talk

Welcome to the 44th post in the $R^4 series.

A few weeks ago, and following an informal ‘call for talks’ by James Lamb, I had an opportunity to talk about r2u to the Chicago ML and MLops meetup groups. You can find the slides here.

Over the last 2 1/2 years, r2u has become a widely-deployed mechanism in a number of settings, including (but not limited to) software testing via continuous integration, deployment on cloud servers—besides of course to more standard use on local laptops or workstation. 30 million downloads illustrate this. My thesis for the talk was that this extends equally to ML(ops) where no surprises, no hickups automated deployments are key for large-scale model training, evaluation and of course production deployments.

In this context, I introduce r2u while giving credit both to what came before it, the existing alternatives (or ‘competitors’ for mindshare if one prefers that phrasing), and of course what lies underneath it.

The central takeaway, I argue, is that r2u can and does take advantage of a unique situation in that we can ‘join’ the package manager task for the underlying (operating) system and and the application domain, here R and its unique CRAN repository network. Other approaches can, and of course do, provide binaries, but by doing this outside the realm of the system package manager can only arrive at a lesser integration (and I show a common error arising in that case). So where r2u is feasible, it dominates the alternatives (while the alternatives may well provide deployment on more platforms which, even when less integrated, may be of greater importance for some). As always, it all depends.

But the talk, and its slides, motivate and illustrate why we keep calling r2u by its slogan of r2u: Fast. Easy. Reliable. Pick All Three.

/code/r4 | permanent link

Wed, 11 Dec 2024

RcppCCTZ 0.2.13 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new release 0.2.13 of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN.

RcppCCTZ uses Rcpp to bring CCTZ to R. CCTZ is a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. In fact, it is two libraries. One for dealing with civil time: human-readable dates and times, and one for converting between between absolute and civil times via time zones. And while CCTZ is made by Google(rs), it is not an official Google product. The RcppCCTZ page has a few usage examples and details. This package was the first CRAN package to use CCTZ; by now several others packages (four the last time we counted) include its sources too. Not ideal, but beyond our control.

This version include most routine package maintenance as well as one small contributed code improvement. The changes since the last CRAN release are summarised below.

Changes in version 0.2.13 (2024-12-11)

No longer set compilation standard as recent R version set a sufficiently high minimum

Qualify a call to cctz::format (Michael Quinn in #44)

Routine updates to continuous integration and badges

Switch to Authors@R in DESCRIPTION

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to to the previous version. More details are at the RcppCCTZ page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository. 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, 08 Dec 2024

pinp 0.0.11 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new version of our pinp package arrived on CRAN today, and is the first release in four years. The pinp package allows for snazzier one or two column Markdown-based pdf vignettes, and is now used by a few packages. A screenshot of the package vignette can be seen below. Additional screenshots are at the pinp page.

pinp vignette

This release contains no new features or new user-facing changes but reflects the standard package and repository maintenance over the four-year window since the last release: updating of actions, updating of URLs and addressing small packaging changes spotted by ever-more-vigilant R checking code.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in pinp version 0.0.11 (2024-12-08)

Standard package maintenance for continuous integration, URL updates, and packaging conventions

Correct two minor nags in the Rd file

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the ping page. For questions or comments use the 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/pinp | permanent link

Fri, 06 Dec 2024

RcppArmadillo 14.2.2-1 on CRAN: Small Upstream Fixes

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) 1197 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 37.5 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 605 times according to Google Scholar.

Conrad released a minor version 14.2.2 yesterday. This followed a bit of recent work a few of us did in the ensmallen and mlpack repositories following the [14.2.0 release]. Use of (member functions) .min(index) and .max(index) was deprecated in Armadillo in favor of .index_mix() and .index_max(). By now ensmallen and mlpack have been updated at CRAN. To add some spice, CRAN emailed that the (very much unreleased as of now, but coming likely next spring) gcc-15 was unhappy with RcppArmadillo due to some Armadillo code. This likely related to the listed gcc-15 C++ change about “Qualified name lookup failure into the current instantiation”. Anyway, Conrad fixed it within days and that change too is part of this new version (as is a small behaviour normalization between the two indexing methods that matters in case of ties, this was in 14.2.1).

The changes since the last CRAN release are summarised below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.2.2-1 (2024-12-05)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.2.2 (Smooth Caffeine)

Workarounds for regressions in pre-release versions of GCC 15

More selective detection of symmetric/hermitian matrices by various functions

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.2.1-1 (2024-11-24) (GitHub Only)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.2.1 (Smooth Caffeine)

Fix for index_min() and index_max() to ensure that the first index of equal extremum values is found

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

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

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

/code/rcpp | permanent link

Wed, 04 Dec 2024

corels 0.0.5 on CRAN: Maintenance

An updated version of the corels package is now on CRAN! The ‘Certifiably Optimal RulE ListS (Corels)’ learner provides interpretable decision rules with an optimality guarantee—a nice feature which sets it apart in machine learning. You can learn more about corels at its UBC site.

The changes concern mostly maintenance for both the repository (such as continunous integration setup, badges, documentation links, …) and the package level (such as removing the no-longer-requiring C++ compilation standard setter now emitting a NOTE at CRAN.

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, 02 Dec 2024

anytime 0.3.10 on CRAN: Multiple Enhancements

A new release of the anytime package arrived on CRAN today—the first is well over four years. The package is fairly feature-complete, and code and functionality remain mature and stable, of course.

This release slowly matured over four years. It combines a number of strictly internal repository maintenance such as changes to continuous integration with small enhancements (adding for example some new formats, responding better to an error condition, dealing with logical input as an error) with a relaxation of the C++ compilation standard. While we once needed C++11, it is now a constraint as as R itself is quite proactive (the last two releases defaulted already to C++17, suitable compiler permitting) we can now relax this constraint. The documentation site is new, as some other small changes. See the full list of changes which follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.10 (2024-12-02)

A new documentation site was added.

Continuous Integration now uses run.sh from r-ci with bspm

Logical input vectors are now recognised as an error (#121)

Additional dot-separated format '%Y.%m.%d' is supported

Other small updates were made throughout the package

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

Switch Rcpp include file to Rcpp/Lightest

We recommend ~/.R/Makevars compiler flag options -Wno-ignored-attributes -Wno-nonnull -Wno-parentheses

The tinytest runner was simplified

NA values from conversion now trigger a warning

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Fri, 29 Nov 2024

RcppAPT 0.0.10: Maintenance

A new version of the RcppAPT package arrived on CRAN earlier today. RcppAPT connects R to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, … commands (and their cache) which powering Debian, Ubuntu and other derivative distributions.

RcppAPT allows you to query the (Debian or Ubuntu) package dependency graph at will, with build-dependencies (if you have deb-src entries), reverse dependencies, and all other goodies. See the vignette and examples for illustrations.

This release moves the C++ compilation standard from C++11 to C++17. I had removed the setting for C++11 last year as compilation ‘by compiler default’ worked well enough. But the version at CRAN still carried, which started to lead to build failures on Debian unstable so it was time for an update. And rather than implicitly relying on C++17 as selected by the last two R releases, we made it explicit. Otherwise a few of the regular package and repository updates have been made, but no new code or features were added The NEWS entries follow.

Changes in version 0.0.10 (2024-11-29)

Package maintenance updating continuous integration script versions as well as coverage link from README, and switching to Authors@R

C++ compilation standards updated to C++17 to comply with libapt-pkg

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. A bit more information about the package is available here as well as 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, 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

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, 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

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/inline | permanent link

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.

/code/gcbd | permanent link

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.

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

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/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)

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.

/code/rcpp | permanent link

Tue, 10 Sep 2024

RcppSpdlog 0.0.18 on CRAN: Updates

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

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

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

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

Upgraded to upstream release spdlog 1.14.1

Minor packaging upgrades

Allow logging levels to be set via environment variable SPDLOG_LEVEL

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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, 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.

/code/rcpp | permanent link

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