R version 3 released

The R language marks a major milestone today with the release of R 3.0.0 (codename: "Masked Marvel"). The increment in the version number reflects not a fundamental change in the R langauge itself, but a recognition that the R codebase has matured to a point where closing out the 2.x series makes sense. 

Nonetheless, this release does include some major behind the scenes updates, not least of which is the introduction of big vectors to R, which eliminates some big data restrictions in the core R engine by allowing R to better use the memory available on 64-bit systems. Tal Galili lists the new functionality available in R 3.0.0 and provides a guide to upgrading and re-installing packages.

From everyone here at Revolution Analytics, our thanks go to the members of the R Core development team, who have volunteered so much time and expertise to furthering the R Project. The world of statistical computing would be a much poorer place without their contributions.

If you build R yourself, R version 3.0.0 is available for download in source from CRAN, and pre-built binaries (for Windows, Mac and Linux) will be available in the next couple of days. For Revolution R Enterprise users, the next release (version 6.2) will be based on the recently-released final Rv2 engine (R 2.15.3). We're currently working on integration of Rv3 for inclusion in a major update to Revolution R Enterprise in late 2013.

R-announce mailing list: R 3.0.0 is released