Rcpp 1.0.4 was released on March 17, following the usual sequence of fairly involved reverse-depends check along with a call for community testing issued weeks before the release. In that email I specifically pleaded with folks to pretty-please test non-standard setups:

It would be particularly beneficial if those with “unsual” build dependencies tested it as we would increase overall coverage beyond what I get from testing against 1800+ CRAN packages. BioConductor would also be welcome.

Alas, you can’t always get what you want. Shortly after the release we were made aware that the two (large) pull request at the book ends of the 1.0.3 to 1.0.4 release period created trouble. Of these two, the earliest PR in the 1.0.4 release upset older-than-CRAN-tested installation, i.e. R 3.3.0 or before. (Why you’d want to run R 3.3.* when R 3.6.3 is current is something I will never understand, but so be it.) This got addressed in two new PRs. And the matching last PR had a bit of sloppyness leaving just about everyone alone, but not all those macbook-wearing data scientists when using newer macOS SDKs not used by CRAN. In other words, “unsual” setups. But boy, do those folks have an ability to complain. Again, two quick PRs later that was addressed. Along came a minor PR with two more Rcpp::Shield<> uses (as life is too short to manually count PROTECT and UNPROTECT). And then a real issue between R 4.0.0 and Rcpp first noticed with RcppParallel builds on Windows but then also affecting RcppArmadillo. Another quickly issued fix. So by now the count is up to six, and we arrived at Rcpp 1.0.4.6.

Which is now on CRAN, after having sat there for nearly a full week, and of course with no reason given. Because the powers that be move in mysterious ways. And don’t answer to earthlings like us.

As may transpire here, I am little tired from all this. I think we can do better, and I think we damn well should, or I may as well throw in the towel and just release to the drat repo where each of the six interim versions was available for all to take as soon as it materialized.

Anyway, here is the state of things. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. As of today, 1897 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 191 in BioConductor. And per the (partial) logs of CRAN downloads, we are running steasy at one millions downloads per month.

The changes for this interim version are summarized below.

Changes in Rcpp patch release version 1.0.4.6 (2020-04-02)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • The exception handler code in #1043 was updated to ensure proper include behavior (Kevin in #1047 fixing #1046).

  • A missing Rcpp_list6 definition was added to support R 3.3.* builds (Davis Vaughan in #1049 fixing #1048).

  • Missing Rcpp_list{2,3,4,5} definition were added to the Rcpp namespace (Dirk in #1054 fixing #1053).

  • A further updated corrected the header include and provided a missing else branch (Mattias Ellert in #1055).

  • Two more assignments are protect with Rcpp::Shield (Dirk in #1059)

• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

  • Empty strings are not passed to R CMD SHLIB which was seen with R 4.0.0 on Windows (Kevin in #1062 fixing #1061).

• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

  • Travis CI unit tests now run a matrix over the versions of R also tested at CRAN (rel/dev/oldrel/oldoldrel), and coverage runs in parallel for a net speed-up (Dirk in #1056 and #1057).

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2356 previous questions.

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.