A new minor / bug fix release 4.300.8 of Armadillo, the templated C++ library for linear algebra, was tagged by Conrad in his SVN repo a few days ago, following earlier snapshots in the 4.300.* series.

We had prepared two earlier releases for GitHub but not CRAN in order to accomodate the CRAN maintainer’s desire of “a release every one to two months” expressed in the CRAN Repo Policy. However, two actual bugs in the interaction between MinGW and C++11 were reported on the rcpp-devel mailing list, and this releases addresses these. Hence time for new release 0.4.300.8.0 of RcppArmadillo which is now on CRAN and in Debian.

This release brings a few upstream changes detailed below such as nice new upstream changes such as more robust norm() (and related) functions, and fixes related to matrix and cube interactions. From our end, we added a better detection of Windows via both _WIN32 and WIN32 (as the former apparently gets undefined by MinGW in C++11 mode). We also added the ability to turn on C++11 support from R (possible since R 3.1.0) yet also turn it off for Armadillo. This is needed as the prescribed compiler on Windows is g++ 4.6.2 — which offers a subset of C++11 which is good enough for a number of things from the C++11 standard, but not advanced enough for everything which Armadillo uses when C++11 support is turned on. As Armadillo continues to offer a choice of C++ standards, we can use the ability to deploy C++11 only outside of its internals. It is worth repeating that this issue should only affect Windows users wishing to use C++11; other platforms are fine as they generally have more modern compilers.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.300.8.0 (2014-05-31)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.300.8 (Medieval Cornea Scraper)

  • More robust norm-related functions

  • Fixes between interactions between cube and vector types.

• Adds a #define ARMA_DONT_USE_CXX11 to provide an option to turn C++11 off for Armadillo (but client packages may still use it)

• More robust Windows detection by using _WIN32 as well as WIN32 as the latter gets diabled by MinGW with C++11

• On Windows, C++11 can be turned off as the Armadillo code base uses more features of C++11 than g++ 4.6.2 version in Rtools implements

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.300.5.0 (2014-05-19)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.300.5 (Medieval Cornea Scraper)

  • Handle possible underflows and overflows in norm(), normalise(), norm_dot()

  • Fix for handling of null vectors by norm_dot()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.300.2.0 (2014-05-13)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.300.2 (Medieval Cornea Scraper)

  • faster find()

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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