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) 706 other packages on CRAN.

A new upstream release 9.860.2 of Armadillo was just released. The theme of “convergence” continues; the previous release increased the minor from 800 to 850, now we are at 860. We first wrapped this up as version 0.9.859.1.0, but it turned out to have been held back by a buglet between R 4.0.0 and Rcpp which the recent patch release fixed (along with other woes on old R or non-CRAN-alike macOS). It then turns out that the new (upstream) version 9.860.1 had a minor bug which I missed as I reverse-depends checked the prior version. Doh. My thanks, as always, to CRAN for spotting this. The fix was added upstream and we have 9.860.2 as RcppArmadillo 0.9.860.2.0.

Changes in the new release are noted below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.860.2.0 (2020-04-13)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.860.2 (Roasted Mocha Fix)

  • Added powmat()

  • Faster access to columns in sparse submatrix views

  • Faster handling of relational expressions by accu()

  • Faster handling of sympd matrices by expmat(), logmat(), sqrtmat()

  • Workaround for save/load issues with HDF5 v1.12

• Vignettes are now pre-made and include (#285)

• Two test files are now skipped on 32-bit Windows

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.

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