Rcpp 0.11.4

A new release 0.11.4 of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R, and an updated Debian package will be uploaded in due course.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 323 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further; BioConductor adds another 41 packages, and casual searches on GitHub suggests dozens mores.

This release once again adds a large number of small bug fixes, polishes and enhancements. And like the last time, these changes were made by a group of seven different contributors (counting code commits) plus three more providing concrete suggestions. This shows that the Rcpp development and maintenance rests a large number of (broad) shoulders.

See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.11.4 (2015-01-20)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • The ListOf<T> class gains the .attr and .names methods common to other Rcpp vectors.

  • The [dpq]nbinom_mu() scalar functions are now available via the R:: namespace when R 3.1.2 or newer is used.

  • Add an additional test for AIX before attempting to include execinfo.h.

  • Rcpp::stop now supports improved printf-like syntax using the small tinyformat header-only library (following a similar implementation in Rcpp11)

  • Pairlist objects are now protected via an additional Shield<> as suggested by Martin Morgan on the rcpp-devel list.

  • Sorting is now prohibited at compile time for objects of type List, RawVector and ExpressionVector.

  • Vectors now have a Vector::const_iterator that is ‘const correct’ thanks to fix by Romain following a bug report in rcpp-devel by Martyn Plummer.

  • The mean() sugar function now uses a more robust two-pass method, and new unit tests for mean() were added at the same time.

  • The mean() and var() functions now support all core vector types.

  • The setequal() sugar function has been corrected via suggestion by Qiang Kou following a bug report by Søren Højsgaard.

  • The macros major, minor, and makedev no longer leak in from the (Linux) system header sys/sysmacros.h.

  • The push_front() string function was corrected.

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • Only look for plugins in the package’s namespace (rather than entire search path).

  • Also scan header files for definitions of functions to be considerd by Attributes.

  • Correct the regular expression for source files which are scanned.

• Changes in Rcpp unit tests

  • Added a new binary test which will load a pre-built package to ensure that the Application Binary Interface (ABI) did not change; this test will (mostly or) only run at Travis where we have reasonable control over the platform running the test and can provide a binary.

  • New unit tests for sugar functions mean, setequal and var were added as noted above.

• Changes in Rcpp Examples:

  • For the (old) examples ConvolveBenchmarks and OpenMP, the respective Makefile was renamed to GNUmakefile to please R CMD check as well as the CRAN Maintainers.

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.