Rcpp 0.12.7: More updates

The seventh update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp just arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R as well as in Debian. This 0.12.7 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, the 0.12.5 release in May, and the 0.12.6 release in July — making it the eleventh release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. Keeping with the established pattern, this is again more of a maintenance release which addresses small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features. One issue that got to a few people was our casual use of NORET in the definition of Rcpp::stop(). We had (ahem) overlooked that NORET is only defined by R 3.2.0 or later, and several folks trying to build on older releases of R (why?) got bitten. Well, at least we have a new record for most frequently reported bug … Kidding aside, this is now fixed.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 759 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by well over fifty packages since the last release in mid-July!

We are once again fortunate to have a number of pull request, from first-timers to regulars. James "coatless" Balamuta in particular relentlessly pushed for better documentation and cleanup of numerous dangling issue tickets. Artem Klevtsov also contributed again. Qiang, Kevin and I also got some changes in for the Rcpp Core team. More details are again below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.7 (2016-09-04)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • The NORET macro is now defined if it was not already defined by R itself (Kevin fixing issue #512).

  • Environment functions get() & find() now accept a Symbol (James Balamuta in #513 addressing issue #326).

  • Several uses of Rf_eval were replaced by the preferred Rcpp::Rcpp_eval (Qiang in PR #523 closing #498).

  • Improved Autogeneration Warning for RcppExports (James Balamuta in #528 addressing issue #526).

  • Fixed invalid C++ prefix identifiers in auto-generated code (James Balamuta in #528 and #531 addressing issue #387; Simon Dirmeier in #548).

  • String constructors now set default UTF-8 encoding (Qiang Kou in #529 fixing #263).

  • Add variadic variants of the RCPP_RETURN_VECTOR and RCPP_RETURN_MATRIX macro when C++11 compiler used (Artem Klevtsov in #537 fixing #38).

• Changes in Rcpp build system

  • Travis CI is now driven via run.sh from our fork, and deploys all packages as .deb binaries using our PPA where needed (Dirk in #540 addressing issue #517).

• Changes in Rcpp unit tests

  • New unit tests for random number generators the R namespace which call the standalone Rmath library. (James Balamuta in #514 addressing issue #28).

• Changes in Rcpp Examples:

  • Examples that used cxxfunction() from the inline package have been rewritten to use either sourceCpp() or cppFunction() (James Balamuta in #541, #535, #534, and #532 addressing issue #56).

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.