RInside 0.2.15

A new release 0.2.15 of RInside arrived on CRAN and in Debian today. This marks the first release in almost two years, and it brings some build enhancements. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by Rcpp.

RInside is stressing the CRAN system a little in that it triggers a number of NOTE and WARNING messages. Some of these are par for the course as we get close to R internals not all of which are “officially” in the API. My continued thanks to the CRAN team for supporting the package.

It has (once again!) been nearly two years since the last release, and a number of nice extensions, build robustifications (mostly for Windows) and fixes had been submitted over this period—see below for the three key pull requests. There are no new user-facing changes.

The most recent change, and the one triggering the change, was based on a rchk report: the one time we call Rf_eval() could conceivably have a memory allocation race so two additional PROTECT calls make it more watertight. The joys of programming with the C API …

But thanks so much to Tomas for patient help, and to Gábor for maintaining the ubuntu-rchk Docker container. While made for rhub, it is also available pre-made here at Docker Cloud which allowed me to run the rchk.sh script in a local instance.

Changes since the last release were:

Changes in RInside version 0.2.15 (2019-03-06)

• Improved Windows build support by copying getenv("R_HOME") result and improving backslash handling in environemt variable setting (Jonathon Love in #27 and #28)

• Improved Windows build support by quote-protecting Rscript path in Makevars.win (François-David Collin in #33)

• A URL was corrected in README.md (Zé Vinícius in #34).

• Temporary SEXP objects are handled more carefully at initialization to satisfy rchk (Dirk in #36)

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page, or to issues tickets at the GitHub repo.

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