A new RcppArmadillo release 0.8.600.0.0, based on the new Armadillo release 8.600.0 from this week, just arrived on CRAN.

It follows our (and Conrad’s) bi-monthly release schedule. We have made interim and release candidate versions available via the GitHub repo (and as usual thoroughly tested them) but this is the real release cycle. A matching Debian release will be prepared in due course.

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) 479 other packages on CRAN.

A high-level summary of changes follows (which omits the two rc releases leading up to 8.600.0). Conrad did his usual impressive load of upstream changes, but we are also grateful for the RcppArmadillo fixes added by Keith O’Hara and Santiago Olivella.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.8.600.0.0 (2018-06-28)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 8.600.0 (Sabretooth Rugrat)

  • added hess() for Hessenberg decomposition

  • added .row(), .rows(), .col(), .cols() to subcube views

  • expanded .shed_rows() and .shed_cols() to handle cubes

  • expanded .insert_rows() and .insert_cols() to handle cubes

  • expanded subcube views to allow non-contiguous access to slices

  • improved tuning of sparse matrix element access operators

  • faster handling of tridiagonal matrices by solve()

  • faster multiplication of matrices with differing element types when using OpenMP

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.8.500.1.1 (2018-05-17) [GH only]

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 8.500.1 (Caffeine Raider)

  • bug fix for banded matricex

• Added slam to Suggests: as it is used in two unit test functions [CRAN requests]

• The RcppArmadillo.package.skeleton() function now works with example_code=FALSE when pkgKitten is present (Santiago Olivella in #231 fixing #229)

• The LAPACK tests now cover band matrix solvers (Keith O’Hara in #230).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. 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.