The fourteenth release in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN yesterday after a somewhat longer-than-usual gestation period (and word is it may have been due to some unrelated disturbances from lots of changes within the main r-devel build).

This release follows the 0.12.0 release from July 2016, the 0.12.1 release in September 2016, the 0.12.2 release in November 2016, the 0.12.3 release in January 2017, the 0.12.4 release in March 2016, the 0.12.5 release in May 2016, the 0.12.6 release in July 2016, the 0.12.7 release in September 2016, the 0.12.8 release in November 2016, the 0.12.9 release in January 2017, the 0.12.10.release in March 2017, the 0.12.11.release in May 2017, the 0.12.12 release in July 2017 and the 0.12.13.release in late September 2017 making it the eighteenth 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, 1246 packages (and hence 77 more since the last release) on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 91 in BioConductor.

This release is relatively minor compared to other releases, but follows through on the deprecattion of the old vectors for Date and Datetime (which were terrible: I was influenced by the vector design in QuantLib at the time and didn’t really understand yet how a SEXP vector should work) we announced with Rcpp 0.12.8 a year ago. So now the new vectors are the default, but you can flip back if you need to with #define.

Otherwise Dan rounded a corner with the improved iterators he contributed, and Kirill improved the output stream implementation suppressing a warning with newer compilers.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.14 (2017-11-17)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • New const iterators functions cbegin() and cend() added to MatrixRow as well (Dan Dillon in #750).

  • The Rostream object now contains a Buffer rather than allocating one (Kirill Müller in #763).

  • New DateVector and DatetimeVector classes are now the default fully deprecating the old classes as announced one year ago.

• Changes in Rcpp Package:

  • DESCRIPTION file now list doi information per CRAN suggestion.

• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

  • Update CITATION file with doi information and PeerJ preprint.

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, 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.