We are thrilled to announce a new big RcppArmadillo release! Conrad recently moved Armadillo to the 8.* series, with significant improvements and speed ups for sparse matrix operations, and more. See below for a brief summary.

This also required some changes at our end which Binxiang Ni provided, and Serguei Sokol improved some instantiations. We now show the new vignette Binxiang Ni wrote for his GSoC contribution, and I converted it (and the other main vignette) to using the pinp package for sleeker pdf vignettes.

This release resumes our bi-monthly CRAN release cycle. I may make interim updates available at GitHub “as needed”. And this time I managed to mess up the reverse depends testing, and missed one sync() call on the way back to R—but all that is now taken care of.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 405 other packages on CRAN.

A high-level summary of changes follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.8.100.1.0 (2017-10-05)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 8.100.1 (Feral Pursuits)

  • faster incremental construction of sparse matrices via element access operators

  • faster diagonal views in sparse matrices

  • expanded SpMat to save/load sparse matrices in coord format

  • expanded .save(),.load() to allow specification of datasets within HDF5 files

  • added affmul() to simplify application of affine transformations

  • warnings and errors are now printed by default to the std::cerr stream

  • added set_cerr_stream() and get_cerr_stream() to replace set_stream_err1(), set_stream_err2(), get_stream_err1(), get_stream_err2()

  • new configuration options ARMA_COUT_STREAM and ARMA_CERR_STREAM

• Constructors for sparse matrices of types dgt, dtt amd dst now use Armadillo code for improved performance (Serguei Sokol in #175 addressing #173)

• Sparse matrices call .sync() before accessing internal arrays (Binxiang Ni in #171)

• The sparse matrix vignette has been converted to Rmarkdown using the pinp package, and is now correctly indexed. (#176)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. 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.