Relatively quickly after version 0.4.5 of RProtoBuf was released, we have a new version 0.4.6 to announce which appeared on CRAN today.

RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“Protobuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects.

This version contains a contributed bug-fix pull request covering conversion of zero-length vectors, and adding native support for S4 objects. At the request / suggestion of the CRAN maintainers, it also uncomments a LaTeX macro in the vignette (corresponding to our recent JSS paper paper) which older R versions do not (yet) have in their jss.cls file.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.6 (2016-09-08)

• Support for serializing zero-length objects was added (PR #18 addressing #13)

• S4 objects are natively encoded (also PR #18)

• The vignette based on the JSS paper no longer uses a macro available only with the R-devel version of jss.cls, and hence builds on all R versions

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has an older package vignette, a ‘quick’ overview vignette, a unit test summary vignette, and the pre-print for the JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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