A new release of the BH package is now on CRAN and its mirrors. BH provides (a subset of) the Boost library for C++, particularly the (large) parts delivered as pure template headers not requiring linking.

When this package is installed, an R package developer can deploy it at build-time via a simple LinkingTo: BH declaration (which, despite the title affects only compilation, not linking; don’t ask…). This frees developers from having to include the (sizeable) Boost headers in their packages, and provides (parts of) Boost as part of the R build system.

A short example of using this BH package with Rcpp is provided in this Rcpp Gallery post; a number of other Boost-related posts are also available.

This release expands the scope of the package by a quite bit as shown in the NEWS entry:

Changes in version 1.51.0-3 (2013-10-19)

• Expanded Boost coverage by adding Boost packages spirit, foreach, math/distributions, algorithm, iostreams.

The other change is that I am now acting as maintainer taking over from Jay who has headed the initial creation and first releases after he, Mike and I had talked about this for way too long without actually doing anything about it. Thanks for getting everything rolling, Jay!

Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker available via the package page at R-Forge.