RcppArmadillo 0.4.650.1.1 (and also 0.4.650.2.0)

A new Armadillo release 4.650.1 was released by Conrad a few days ago. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab.

It turned out that this release had one shortcoming with respect to the C++11 RNG initializations in the R use case (where we need to protect the users from the C++98 RNG deemed unsuitable by the CRAN gatekeepers). And this lead to upstream release 4.650.1 which we wrapped into RcppArmadillo 0.4.650.1.1. As before this, was tested against all 107 reverse dependencies of RcppArmadillo on the CRAN repo.

This version is now on CRAN, and was just uploaded to Debian. Its changes are summarized below based on the NEWS.Rd file.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.650.1.1 (2015-02-25)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.650.1 ("Intravenous Caffeine Injector")

  • added randg() for generating random values from gamma distributions (C++11 only)

  • added .head_rows() and .tail_rows() to submatrix views

  • added .head_cols() and .tail_cols() to submatrix views

  • expanded eigs_sym() to optionally calculate eigenvalues with smallest/largest algebraic values fixes for handling of sparse matrices

• Applied small correction to main header file to set up C++11 RNG whether or not the alternate RNG (based on R, our default) is used

Now, it turns out that another small fix was needed for the corner case of a submatrix within a submatrix, ie V.subvec(1,10).tail(5). I decided not to re-release this to CRAN given the CRAN Repository Policy preference for releases “no more than every 1–2 months”.

But fear not, for we now have drat. I created a drat package repository in the RcppCore account (to not put a larger package into my main drat repository often used via a fork to initialize a drat). So now with these two simple commands

## if needed, first install 'drat' via:   install.packages("drat")
drat:::add("RcppCore")
update.packages()

you will get the newest RcppArmadillo via this drat package repository. And course install.packages("RcppArmadillo") would also work, but takes longer to type 🙂

Lastly, courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN 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.