Rcpp 0.12.6: Rolling on

The sixth 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 0.12.6 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, the 0.12.4 release in March, and the 0.12.5 release in May — making it the tenth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. Just like the previous release, this one is once again more of a refining maintenance release which addresses small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features. That said, some nice features (such as caching support for sourceCpp() and friends) were added.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 703 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by about fourty packages from the last release in May!

Similar to the previous releases, we have contributions from first-time committers. Artem Klevtsov made na_omit run faster on vectors without NA values. Otherwise, we had many contributions from "regulars" like Kirill Mueller, James "coatless" Balamuta and Dan Dillon as well as from fellow Rcpp Core contributors. Some noteworthy highlights are encoding and string fixes, generally more robust builds, a new iterator-based approach for vectorized programming, the aforementioned caching for sourceCpp(), and several documentation enhancements. More details are below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.6 (2016-07-18)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • The long long data type is used only if it is available, to avoid compiler warnings (Kirill Müller in #488).

  • The compiler is made aware that stop() never returns, to improve code path analysis (Kirill Müller in #487 addressing issue #486).

  • String replacement was corrected (Qiang in #479 following mailing list bug report by Masaki Tsuda)

  • Allow for UTF-8 encoding in error messages via RCPP_USING_UTF8_ERROR_STRING macro (Qin Wenfeng in #493)

  • The R function Rf_warningcall is now provided as well (as usual without leading Rf_) (#497 fixing #495)

• Changes in Rcpp Sugar:

  • Const-ness of min and max functions has been corrected. (Dan Dillon in PR #478 fixing issue #477).

  • Ambiguities for matrix/vector and scalar operations have been fixed (Dan Dillon in PR #476 fixing issue #475).

  • New algorithm header using iterator-based approach for vectorized functions (Dan in PR #481 revisiting PR #428 and addressing issue #426, with futher work by Kirill in PR #488 and Nathan in #503 fixing issue #502).

  • The na_omit() function is now faster for vectors without NA values (Artem Klevtsov in PR #492)

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • Add cacheDir argument to sourceCpp() to enable caching of shared libraries across R sessions (JJ in #504).

  • Code generation now deals correctly which packages containing a dot in their name (Qiang in #501 fixing #500).

• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

  • A section on default parameters was added to the Rcpp FAQ vignette (James Balamuta in #505 fixing #418).

  • The Rcpp-attributes vignette is now mentioned more prominently in question one of the Rcpp FAQ vignette.

  • The Rcpp Quick Reference vignette received a facelift with new sections on Rcpp attributes and plugins begin added. (James Balamuta in #509 fixing #484).

  • The bib file was updated with respect to the recent JSS publication for RProtoBuf.

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.