R 3.3.0 now available

R 3.3.0, a major annual update to the R Language, was released earlier this week and is now available from your local CRAN mirror for Windows, Mac (OSX 10.6 or later) and Linux systems. (Or as always, you can build it yourself from sources). This update — codenamed "Supposedly Educational" — makes a number of significant improvements to R, including:

• Support on all platforms for downloading data from secure HTTPS-enabled sites using download.file 
• A new function sigma to calculate residual standard deviation for a variety of statistical models
• Speed improvements for a number of low-level R functions (which are in turn called my many higher-level functions, and likely your own R code). These include speedups for vector selection with boolean data, function argument matching, sorting vectors, and finding a single value in a vector with match  
• R now includes a new, high-performance radix sort algorithm. This algorithm was contributed by Matt Dowle, who used it to make the data.table package fast, and now it's available to all R developers.
• R's icons are now based on the new "flat" version of the R logo (thanks to an SVG version contributed by RStudio)
• Packages built using C++11 code are now supported on Windows
• Various bug fixes, including one that could sometimes cause R to crash when it runs out of resources.

As this is a major release, you'll need to re-install any packages you were using (and perhaps wait a little while until package authors make any compatibility fixes needed for version 3.3.0). If you're on the Windows platform, Tal Galili's installR package automates the process for you. If you are using the checkpoint package (on any platform) you can simply increment the checkpoint date to anytime after May 2, 2016.

(For Microsoft R Open users, the next version to be released will be MRO 3.2.5, and MRO 3.3.0 will follow soon thereafter.)

For more information about R 3.3.0, including the detailed list of changes and bug fixes, follow the link to the announcement from the R Core Group below.

R-announce mailing list: R 3.3.0 is released