A new RcppArmadillo release, now at 0.9.200.4.0, based on the new Armadillo release 9.200.4 from earlier this week, is now on CRAN, and should get to Debian very soon.

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) 532 (or 31 more since just the last release!) other packages on CRAN.

This release once again brings a number of improvements, see below for details.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.200.4.0 (2018-11-09)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.200.4 (Carpe Noctem)

  • faster handling of symmetric positive definite matrices by rcond()

  • faster transpose of matrices with size ≥ 512×512

  • faster handling of compound sparse matrix expressions by accu(), diagmat(), trace()

  • faster handling of sparse matrices by join_rows()

  • expanded sign() to handle scalar arguments

  • expanded operators (*, %, +, −) to handle sparse matrices with differing element types (eg. multiplication of complex matrix by real matrix)

  • expanded conv_to() to allow conversion between sparse matrices with differing element types

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

  • workaround for gcc and clang bug in C++17 mode

• Commented-out sparse matrix test consistently failing on the fedora-clang machine CRAN, and only there. No fix without access.

• The ‘Unit test’ vignette is no longer included.

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.