A new RcppArmadillo release 0.9.100.5.0, based on the new Armadillo release 9.100.5 from earlier today, is now on CRAN and in Debian.

It once again follows our (and Conrad’s) bi-monthly release schedule. Conrad started with a new 9.100.* series a few days ago. I ran reverse-depends checks and found an issue which he promptly addressed; CRAN found another which he also very promptly addressed. It remains a true pleasure to work with such experienced professionals as Conrad (with whom I finally had a beer around the recent useR! in his home town) and of course the CRAN team whose superb package repository truly is the bedrock of the R community.

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.

This release once again brings a number of improvements to the sparse matrix functionality. We also fixed one use case of the OpemMP compiler and linker flags which will likely hit a number of the by now 501 (!!) CRAN packages using RcppArmadillo.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.100.5.0 (2018-08-16)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.100.4 (Armatus Ad Infinitum)

  • faster handling of symmetric/hermitian positive definite matrices by solve()

  • faster handling of inv_sympd() in compound expressions

  • added .is_symmetric()

  • added .is_hermitian()

  • expanded spsolve() to optionally allow keeping solutions of systems singular to working precision

  • new configuration options ARMA_OPTIMISE_SOLVE_BAND and ARMA_OPTIMISE_SOLVE_SYMPD smarter use of the element cache in sparse matrices

  • smarter use of the element cache in sparse matrices

• Aligned OpenMP flags in the RcppArmadillo.package.skeleton used Makevars,.win to not use one C and C++ flag.

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.

Edited on 2018-08-17 to correct one sentence (thanks, Barry!) and adjust the RcppArmadillo to 501 (!!) as we crossed the threshold of 500 packages overnight.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.