RInside 0.2.9

A new version 0.2.9 of RInside arrived on CRAN earlier today; Windows binaries have already been built too. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package.

This release adds a few new features as detailed in the extract from the NEWS below.

A key new feature is the added support for resilience to bad user input based on discussions and an initial (but altered) patch by Theodore Lytras. There are a few ways that this can be deployedon so we also added two more example programs detailing it. The featured Qt example and the Wt example have been updated to use this too.

Another feature that may be quite useful for some is the additonal attempt to find a value for R_HOME if none has been set. The value is typically found at compile time of the RInside package which poses a problem for those using the Windows build — which is shipped as a binary reflecting the value of the build system. One alternative has always been to build the package locally too to get the local value, or to set it explicitly. But because the error behaviour – a cryptic message of Cannot open base package – is confusing to many, we now try to call the R function which gets this value from the registry. This may need more tweaking and testing, and if you use RInside on the Windows platform I would appreciate feedback.

The complete list of changes since the last release are summarized below in the corresponding NEWS file entry:

Changes in RInside version 0.2.9 (2012-11-04)

• Applied (modified) patch by Theodore Lytras which lets RInside recover from some parsing errors and makes RInside applications more tolerant of errors

• Added non-throwing variants of parseEval() and parseEvalQ()

• Modified Qt and Wt examples of density estimation applications to be much more resilient to bad user input

• On Windows, have RInside use R’s get_R_HOME() function to get R_HOME value from registry if not set by user

• Added note to examples/standard/Makefile.win that R_HOME may need to be set to run the executables – so either export your local value, or re-install RInside from source to have it reflected in the library build of libRinside

• Updated CMake build support for standard, armadillo and eigen

• Improved CMake builds of examples/standard, examples/eigen and examples/armadillo by detecting architecture

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.