Rcpp 0.12.5: Yet another one

The fifth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp has arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R a few hours ago, and was just pushed to Debian. This 0.12.5 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, and the 0.12.4 release in March — making it the ninth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. This release is one again more of a maintenance release addressing a number of small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 662 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by almost fifty packages from the last release in late March!

And as during the last few releases, we have first-time committers. we have new first-time contributors. Sergio Marques helped to enable compilation on Alpine Linux (with its smaller libc variant). Qin Wenfeng helped adapt for Windows builds under R 3.3.0 and the long-awaited new toolchain. Ben Goodrich fixed a (possibly ancient) Rcpp Modules bug he encountered when working with rstan. Other (recurrent) contributor Dan Dillon cleaned up an issue with Nullable and strings. Rcpp Core team members Kevin and JJ took care of small build nuisance on Windows, and I added in a new helper function, updated the skeleton generator and (finally) formally deprecated loadRcppModule() for which loadModule() has been preferred since around R 2.15 or so. More details and links are below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.5 (2016-05-14)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • The checks for different C library implementations now also check for Musl used by Alpine Linux (Sergio Marques in PR #449).

  • Rcpp::Nullable works better with Rcpp::String (Dan Dillon in PR #453).

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • R 3.3.0 Windows with Rtools 3.3 is now supported (Qin Wenfeng in PR #451).

  • Correct handling of dependent file paths on Windows (use winslash = "/").

• Changes in Rcpp Modules:

  • An apparent race condition in Module loading seen with R 3.3.0 was fixed (Ben Goodrich in #461 fixing #458).

  • The (older) loadRcppModules() is now deprecated in favour of loadModule() introduced around R 2.15.1 and Rcpp 0.9.11 (PR #470).

• Changes in Rcpp support functions:

  • The Rcpp.package.skeleton() function was again updated in order to create a DESCRIPTION file which passes R CMD check without notes. warnings, or error under R-release and R-devel (PR #471).

  • A new function compilerCheck can test for minimal g++ versions (PR #474).

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.