Rcpp 0.8.4

Romain and I wrapped up release 0.8.4 of Rcpp last Friday. However, given the time of year, it only appeared on CRAN this morning, and then only after some prodding as CRAN processing is more or less closed this week and probably next.

This release builds upon release 0.8.3. Highlights include changes to the sugar framework for highly expressive C++ constructs which gained new vector function as well as a first set of matrix function. As well, unit tests have been reorganised in such a way that we end up with a lot fewer compilations (but of several files at once) which reaps significant speed gains. Date calculation now use the same mktime() function R itself uses (and which comes from Arthur Olson’s tzone library). The NEWS entry follows below:

0.8.4   2010-07-09

    o   new sugar vector functions: rep, rep_len, rep_each, rev, head, tail,
        diag
        
    o   sugar has been extended to matrices: The Matrix class now extends the 
        Matrix_Base template that implements CRTP. Currently sugar functions 
        for matrices are: outer, col, row, lower_tri, upper_tri, diag

    o   The unit tests have been reorganised into fewer files with one call
        each to cxxfunction() (covering multiple tests) resulting in a
        significant speedup

    o   The Date class now uses the same mktime() replacement that R uses
        (based on original code from the timezone library by Arthur Olson)
        permitting wide dates ranges on all operating systems

    o   The FastLM example has been updated, a new benchmark based on the
        historical Longley data set has been added

    o   RcppStringVector now uses std::vector internally
    
    o   setting the .Data slot of S4 objects did not work properly

As always, even fuller details are in Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page