Rcpp 0.12.16: A small update

The sixteenth update the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN earlier this evening after a few days of gestation in incoming/ at CRAN.

Once again, 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, the 0.12.13.release in late September 2017, the 0.12.14.release in November 2017, and the 0.12.15.release in January 2018 making it the twentieth 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, 1316 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 91 in BioConductor.

Compared to other releases, this release contains a relatively small change set, but between Kirill, Kevin and myself a few things got cleaned up and solidified. Full details are below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.16 (2018-03-08)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • Rcpp now sets and puts the RNG state upon each entry to an Rcpp function, ensuring that nested invocations of Rcpp functions manage the RNG state as expected (Kevin in #825 addressing #823).

  • The R::pythag wrapper has been commented out; the underlying function has been gone from R since 2.14.0, and ::hypot() (part of C99) is now used unconditionally for complex numbers (Dirk in #826).

  • The long long type can now be used on 64-bit Windows (Kevin in #811 and again in #829 addressing #804).

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • Code generated with cppFunction() now uses .Call() directly (Kirill Mueller in #813 addressing #795).

• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

  • The Rcpp FAQ vignette is now indexed as ‘Rcpp-FAQ’; a stale Gmane reference was removed and entry for getting compilers under Conda was added.

  • The top-level README.md now has a Support section.

  • The Rcpp.bib reference file was refreshed to current versions.

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. 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.