Another bi-monthly update and the seventeenth release in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN late on Friday following nine (!!) days in gestation in the incoming/ directory of CRAN. And no complaints: we just wish CRAN were a little more forthcoming with what is happenening when, and/or would let us help supplying additional test information. I do run a fairly insane amount of backtests prior to releases, only to then have to wait another week or more is … not ideal. But again, we all owe CRAN and immense amount of gratitude for all they do, and do so well.

So once more, 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, the 0.12.15.release in January 2018 and the 0.12.16.release in March 2018 making it the twenty-first 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, 1362 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 138 in the current BioConductor release 3.7.

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

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.17 (2018-05-09)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • The random number Generator class no longer inhreits from RNGScope (Kevin in #837 fixing #836).

  • A spurious parenthesis was removed to please gcc8 (Dirk fixing #841)

  • The optional Timer class header now undefines FALSE which was seen to have side-effects on some platforms (Romain in #847 fixing #846).

  • Optional StoragePolicy attributes now also work for string vectors (Romain in #850 fixing #849).

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.