Rcpp 0.11.3

A new release 0.11.3 of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R, and an updated Debian package has been uploaded too.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 273 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further.

This release brings a fairly large number of continued enhancements, fixes and polishing to Rcpp. These were provided by a total of seven different contributors—which is a new record as well.

See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file, but some highlights included in this release are

• Several API cleanups, polishes and a pre-announced code removal
• New InternalFunction interface, and new Timer functionality.
• More robust functionality of Rcpp Attributes as well as a new dryRun option.
• The Rcpp FAQ was updated, as was the main Description: in the DESCRIPTION file.
• Rcpp.package.skeleton() can now deploy functionality from pkgKitten to create Rcpp packages that purr.

One sore point, however, is that we missed that packages using Rcpp Modules appear to require a rebuild. We are sorry for the inconvenience; this has highlighted a shortcoming in our fairly robust and extensive tests. While we test our packages against all known CRAN dependents, such tests check for the ability to compile and run freshly and not whether previously built packages still run. We intend to augment our testing in this direction to avoid a repeat occurrence of such a misfeature.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.11.3 (2014-09-27)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • The deprecation of RCPP_FUNCTION_* which was announced with release 0.10.5 last year is proceeding as planned, and the file macros/preprocessor_generated.h has been removed.

  • Timer no longer records time between steps, but times from the origin. It also gains a get_timers(int) methods that creates a vector of Timer that have the same origin. This is modelled on the Rcpp11 implementation and is more useful for situations where we use timers in several threads. Timer also gains a constructor taking a nanotime_t to use as its origin, and a origin method. This can be useful for situations where the number of threads is not known in advance but we still want to track what goes on in each thread.

  • A cast to bool was removed in the vector proxy code as inconsistent behaviour between clang and g++ compilations was noticed.

  • A missing update(SEXP) method was added thanks to pull request by Omar Andres Zapata Mesa.

  • A proxy for DimNames was added.

  • A no_init option was added for Matrices and Vectors.

  • The InternalFunction class was updated to work with std::function (provided a suitable C++11 compiler is available) via a pull request by Christian Authmann.

  • A new_env() function was added to Environment.h

  • The return value of range eraser for Vectors was fixed in a pull request by Yixuan Qiu.

• Changes in Rcpp Sugar:

  • In ifelse(), the returned NA type was corrected for operator[].

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • Include LinkingTo in DESCRIPTION fields scanned to confirm that C++ dependencies are referenced by package.

  • Add dryRun parameter to sourceCpp.

  • Corrected issue with relative path and R chunk use for sourceCpp.

• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

  • The Rcpp-FAQ vignette was updated with respect to OS X issues.

  • A new entry in the Rcpp-FAQ clarifies the use of licenses.

  • Vignettes build results no longer copied to /tmp to please CRAN.

  • The Description in DESCRIPTION has been shortened.

• Changes in Rcpp support functions:

  • The Rcpp.package.skeleton() function will now use pkgKitten package, if available, to create a package which passes R CMD check without warnings. A new Suggests: has been added for pkgKitten.

  • The modules=TRUE case for Rcpp.package.skeleton() has been improved and now runs without complaints from R CMD check as well.

• Changes in Rcpp unit test functions:

  • Functions from the RUnit package are now prefixed with RUnit::

  • The testRcppModule and testRcppClass sample packages now pass R CMD check --as-cran cleanly with NOTES or WARNINGS

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, 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.

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