The second Armadillo release of the 7.* series came out a few weeks ago: version 7.200.2. And RcppArmadillo version 0.7.200.2.0 is now on CRAN and uploaded to Debian. This followed the usual thorough reverse-dependecy checking of by now over 240 packages using it.

For once, I let it simmer a little preparing only a package update via the GitHub repo without preparing a CRAN upload to lower the update frequency a little. Seeing that Conrad has started to release 7.300.0 tarballs, the time for a (final) 7.200.2 upload was now right.

Just like the previous, it now requires a recent enough compiler. As g++ is so common, we explicitly test for version 4.6 or newer. So if you happen to be on an older RHEL or CentOS release, you may need to get yourself a more modern compiler. R on Windows is now at 4.9.3 which is decent (yet stable) choice; the 4.8 series of g++ will also do. For reference, the current LTS of Ubuntu is at 5.4.0, and we have g++ 6.1 available in Debian testing.

This new upstream release adds new indexing helpers, additional return codes on some matrix transformations, increased speed for compound expressions via vectorise, corrects some LAPACK feature detections (affecting principally complex number use under OS X), and a rewritten sample() function thanks to James Balamuta.

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.

Changes in this release (and the preceding GitHub-only release 0.7.200.1.0 are as follows:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.200.2.0 (2016-07-22)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.200.2

• The sampling extension was rewritten to use Armadillo vector types instead of Rcpp types (PR #101 by James Balamuta)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.200.1.0 (2016-06-06)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.200.1

  • added .index_min() and .index_max()

  • expanded ind2sub() to handle vectors of indices

  • expanded sub2ind() to handle matrix of subscripts

  • expanded expmat(), logmat() and sqrtmat() to optionally return a bool indicating success

  • faster handling of compound expressions by vectorise()

• The configure code now (once again) sets the values for the LAPACK feature #define correctly.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. 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.