Following up on both the initial RcppSimdJson release and the first update, the second update release 0.0.3 arrived on CRAN yesterday.

RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic simdjson library by Daniel Lemire which is truly impressive. Via some very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in persing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. For illustration, I highly recommend the video of the recent talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (which was also voted best talk). The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle use per byte parsed.

This release once again syncs the simdjson headers with upstream, and strengthens the build setup a little bit more. We only turn C++17 (which is needed) on when R knows it (from its builds), report the architecture status at package load (in a suppressable message), and only attempt to parse in examples and unit tests when know that we are on a sufficient platform. The full NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2020-03-03)

• Sychronized once more with upstream.

• Created new C++ function to check for unsupported architecture, and report the status on package load.

• Only run example and unit tests if supported architecture is found.

• Created small configure script to see if R was built with C++17 support, and record it in src/Makevars.

For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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