Rcpp 0.12.11: Loads of goodies

The elevent update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN yesterday following the initial upload on the weekend, and the Debian package and Windows binaries should follow as usual. The 0.12.11 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, the 0.12.9 release in January, and the 0.12.10.release in March — making it the fifteenth 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, 1026 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 91 in BioConductor.

This releases follows on the heels of R’s 3.4.0 release and addresses on or two issues from the transition, along with a literal boatload of other fixes and enhancements. James "coatless" Balamuta was once restless in making the documentation better, Kirill Mueller addressed a number of more obscure compiler warnings (triggered under under -Wextra and the like), Jim Hester improved excecption handling, and much more mostly by the Rcpp Core team. All changes are listed below in some detail.

One big change that JJ made is that Rcpp Attributes also generate the now-almost-required package registration. (For background, I blogged about this one, two, three times.) We tested this, and do not expect it to throw curveballs. If you have an existing src/init.c, or if you do not have registration set in your NAMESPACE. It should cover most cases. But one never knows, and one first post-release buglet related to how devtools tests things has already been fixed in this PR by JJ.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.11 (2017-05-20)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • Rcpp::exceptions can now be constructed without a call stack (Jim Hester in #663 addressing #664).

  • Somewhat spurious compiler messages under very verbose settings are now suppressed (Kirill Mueller in #670, #671, #672, #687, #688, #691).

  • Refreshed the included tinyformat template library (James Balamuta in #674 addressing #673).

  • Added printf-like syntax support for exception classes and variadic templating for Rcpp::stop and Rcpp::warning (James Balamuta in #676).

  • Exception messages have been rewritten to provide additional information. (James Balamuta in #676 and #677 addressing #184).

  • One more instance of Rf_mkString is protected from garbage collection (Dirk in #686 addressing #685).

  • Two exception specification that are no longer tolerated by g++-7.1 or later were removed (Dirk in #690 addressing #689)

• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

  • Added a Known Issues section to the Rcpp FAQ vignette (James Balamuta in #661 addressing #628, #563, #552, #460, #419, and #251).

• Changes in Rcpp Sugar:

  • Added sugar function trimws (Nathan Russell in #680 addressing #679).

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • Automatically generate native routine registrations (JJ in #694)

  • The plugins for C++11, C++14, C++17 now set the values R 3.4.0 or later expects; a plugin for C++98 was added (Dirk in #684 addressing #683).

• Changes in Rcpp support functions:

  • The Rcpp.package.skeleton() function now creates a package registration file provided R 3.4.0 or later is used (Dirk in #692)

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.