A new Armadillo release 5.300.4 was prepared by Conrad the other day, and we prepared a new corresponding RcppArmadillo release 0.5.300.4.0 which is now on CRAN and in way into Debian.

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.

This release brings a considerable amount of new code extending support for sparse matrices, support for Schur decompositions, and much more as shown in the extract from NEWS file:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.300.4 (2015-08-03)

• Upgraded to Armadillo 5.300.4 (“Plutocrazy Incorporated”)

  • added generalised Schur decomposition: qz()

  • added .has_inf() and .has_nan()

  • expanded interp1() to handle out-of-domain locations

  • expanded sparse matrix class with .set_imag() and .set_real()

  • expanded imag(), real() and conj() to handle sparse matrices

  • expanded diagmat(), reshape() and resize() to handle sparse matrices

  • faster sparse sum()

  • faster row-wise sum(), mean(), min(), max()

  • updated physical constants to NIST 2014 CODATA values

  • fixes for handling sparse submatrix views

  • Armadillo can make use of GPUs by linking with NVIDIA NVBLAS (a GPU-accelerated implementation of BLAS), or by linking with AMD ACML (which can use GPUs via OpenCL)

• Added importFrom statements for R functions not from base

• Added explicit Rcpp::sourceCpp() reference as well

• Updated one formatting detail in vignette to please TeXlive2015

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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