Rcpp 0.12.10: Some small fixes

The tenth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp just made it to the main CRAN repository providing GNU R with by now over 10,000 packages. Windows binaries for Rcpp, as well as updated Debian packages will follow in due course. This 0.12.10 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, the 0.12.6 release in July, the 0.12.7 release in September, the 0.12.8 release in November, and the 0.12.9 release in January — making it the fourteenth release at the steady and predictable bi-montly release frequency.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 975 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by sixtynine packages over the two months since the last release — or just over a package a day!

The changes in this release are almost exclusively minor bugfixes and enhancements to documentation and features: James "coatless" Balamuta rounded out the API, Iñaki Ucar fixed a bug concerning one-character output, Jeroen Ooms allowed for finalizers on XPtr objects, Nathan Russell corrected handling of lower (upper) triangular matrices, Dan Dillon and I dealt with Intel compiler quirks for his algorithm.h header, and I added a C++17 plugin along with some (overdue!) documentation regarding the various C++ standards that are supported by Rcpp (which is in essence whatever your compiler supports, i.e., C++98, C++11, C++14 all the way to C++17 but always keep in mind what CRAN and different users may deploy).

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.10 (2017-03-17)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • Added new size attribute aliases for number of rows and columns in DataFrame (James Balamuta in #638 addressing #630).

  • Fixed single-character handling in Rstreambuf (Iñaki Ucar in #649 addressing #647).

  • XPtr gains a parameter finalizeOnExit to enable running the finalizer when R quits (Jeroen Ooms in #656 addressing #655).

• Changes in Rcpp Sugar:

  • Fixed sugar functions upper_tri() and lower_tri() (Nathan Russell in #642 addressing #641).

  • The algorithm.h file now accomodates the Intel compiler (Dirk in #643 and Dan in #645 addressing issue #640).

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes

  • The C++17 standard is supported with a new plugin (used eg for g++-6.2).

• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

  • An overdue explanation of how C++11, C++14, and C++17 can be used was added to the Rcpp FAQ.

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.