Rcpp 0.12.12: Rounding some corners

The twelveth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN this morning, following two days of testing at CRAN preceded by five full reverse-depends checks we did (and which are always logged in this GitHub repo). The Debian package has been built and uploaded; Windows and macOS binaries should follow at CRAN as usual. This 0.12.12 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, the 0.12.10.release in March, and the 0.12.11.release in May making it the sixteenth 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, 1097 packages (and hence 71 more since the last release in May) on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 91 in BioConductor.

This releases contain a fairly large number of fairly small and focused pull requests most of which either correct some corner cases or improve other aspects. JJ tirelessly improved the package registration added in the previous release and following R 3.4.0. Kirill tidied up a number of small issues allowing us to run compilation in even more verbose modes—usually a good thing. Jeroen, Elias Pipping and Yo Gong all contributed as well, and we thank everybody for their contributions.

All changes are listed below in some detail.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.12 (2017-07-13)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • The tinyformat.h header now ends in a newline (#701).

  • Fixed rare protection error that occurred when fetching stack traces during the construction of an Rcpp exception (Kirill Müller in #706).

  • Compilation is now also possibly on Haiku-OS (Yo Gong in #708 addressing #707).

  • Dimension attributes are explicitly cast to int (Kirill Müller in #715).

  • Unused arguments are no longer declared (Kirill Müller in #716).

  • Visibility of exported functions is now supported via the R macro atttribute_visible (Jeroen Ooms in #720).

  • The no_init() constructor accepts R_xlen_t (Kirill Müller in #730).

  • Loop unrolling used R_xlen_t (Kirill Müller in #731).

  • Two unused-variables warnings are now avoided (Jeff Pollock in #732).

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • Execute tools::package_native_routine_registration_skeleton within package rather than current working directory (JJ in #697).

  • The R portion no longer uses dir.exists to no require R 3.2.0 or newer (Elias Pipping in #698).

  • Fix native registration for exports with name attribute (JJ in #703 addressing #702).

  • Automatically register init functions for Rcpp Modules (JJ in #705 addressing #704).

  • Add Shield around parameters in Rcpp::interfaces (JJ in #713 addressing #712).

  • Replace dot (".") with underscore ("_") in package names when generating native routine registrations (JJ in #722 addressing #721).

  • Generate C++ native routines with underscore ("_") prefix to avoid exporting when standard exportPattern is used in NAMESPACE (JJ in #725 addressing #723).

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.