A new major version 5.000 of Armadillo was released by Conrad a couple of 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.

This version brings several new functions for sparse matrices, and automagically switches to 64-bit matrix indices in C++11 mode. See below for a short description of all the major changes based on the NEWS.Rd file.

This version is now on CRAN, as well as in Debian. The integration into CRAN was delayed by a few days as my testing had a shortcoming. We run full reverse-dependency checks against all 115 CRAN package depending in RcppArmadillo, and we even made full pre-release 0.4.999.1 and 0.5.000.0 shipped to the drat repo of the RcppCore GitHub organization (which was described in the previous release post). But a minor flaw in my setup made it miss how the change in indexing affected packages dfcomb and dfmta. My thanks to its maintainer Marie-Karelle Riviere for providing updates to her packages permitting this release to get onto CRAN. The testing process has been tightened and this should not happen again.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.000.0 (2015-04-12)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 5.000 (“Ankle Biter”)

  • added spsolve() for solving sparse systems of linear equations

  • added svds() for singular value decomposition of sparse matrices

  • added nonzeros() for extracting non-zero values from matrices

  • added handling of diagonal views by sparse matrices

  • expanded repmat() to handle sparse matrices

  • expanded join_rows() and join_cols() to handle sparse matrices

  • sort_index() and stable_sort_index() have been placed in the delayed operations framework for increased efficiency

  • use of 64 bit integers is automatically enabled when using a C++11 compiler

  • workaround for a bug in recent releases of Apple Xcode

  • workaround for a bug in LAPACK 3.5

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.999.1.0 (2015-04-04)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release preview 4.999.1

• Non-CRAN test release

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.