Version 0.6.7 of the Rcpp package—a set of C++ classes making it easier to glue C/C++ code to R—is now on CRAN and Debian. This is a fairly incremental release that contains just a few small changes that arose since the previous release in August.

One change is that a new type RcppList was added which allows us to build R ‘list’ types in C++. In particular, this makes it possible to have data structures of different types and dimensions. We had not previously accomodated this as our data structures where more regularised (i.e. think matrices or vectors of various types). The need for this came out of the work with the recently started RProtoBuf package which interfaces the Google ProtoBuf library. The incredible Romain François has joined the project and added a number of nice tricks; this will need another blogpost sooner rather than later. In the meantime, check out the RProtoBuf pages at R-Forge.

Another small change was the addition of a self-contained example of a function callback from C++ into R which wasn’t all that well documented before; this was in response to a user request.

Finally, I started RcppList as a first step in reorganising the code a little better and split the class header and body off into separate files. This required changes to the infrastrucure files Makevars, cleanup, … and I promptly forgot the Makevars.win Windoze variant which will require a 0.6.8 release real soon.