RcppArmadillo 0.7.960.1.1

On the heels of the very recent bi-monthly RcppArmadillo release comes a quick bug-fix release 0.7.960.1.1 which just got onto CRAN (and I will ship a build to Debian in a moment).

There were three distinct issues I addressed in three quick pull requests:

• The excellent Google Summer of Code work by Binxiang Ni had only encountered direct use of sparse matrices as produced by the Matrix. However, while we waited for 0.7.960.1.0 to make it onto CRAN, the quanteda package switched to derived classes—which we now account for via the is() method of our S4 class. Thanks to Kevin Ushey for reminding me we had is().
• We somehow missed to account for the R 3.4.* and Rcpp 0.12.{11,12} changes for package registration (with .registration=TRUE), so ensured we only have one fastLm symbol.
• The build did not take not too well to systems without OpenMP, so we now explicitly unset supported via an Armadillo configuration variable. In general, client packages probably want to enable C++11 support when using OpenMP (explicitly) but we prefer to not upset too many (old) users. However, our configure check now also wants g++ 4.7.2 or later just like Armadillo.

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) 382 other packages on CRAN—an increase of 52 since the CRAN release in June!

Changes in this release relative to the previous CRAN release are as follows:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.960.1.1 (2017-08-20)

• Added improved check for inherited S4 matrix classes (#162 fixing #161)

• Changed fastLm C++ function to fastLm_impl to not clash with R method (#164 fixing #163)

• Added OpenMP check for configure (#166 fixing #165)

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.