Another RcppArmadillo release hit CRAN today. Since our last 0.8.100.1.0 release in October, Conrad kept busy and produced Armadillo releases 8.200.0, 8.200.1, 8.300.0 and now 8.300.1. We tend to now package these (with proper reverse-dependency checks and all) first for the RcppCore drat repo from where you can install them “as usual” (see the repo page for details). But this actual release resumes within our normal bi-monthly CRAN release cycle.

These releases improve a few little nags on the recent switch to more extensive use of OpenMP, and round out a number of other corners. See below for a brief summary.

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) 405 other packages on CRAN.

A high-level summary of changes follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.8.300.1.0 (2017-12-04)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 8.300.1 (Tropical Shenanigans)

  • faster handling of band matrices by solve()

  • faster handling of band matrices by chol()

  • faster randg() when using OpenMP

  • added normpdf()

  • expanded .save() to allow appending new datasets to existing HDF5 files

• Includes changes made in several earlier GitHub-only releases (versions 0.8.300.0.0, 0.8.200.2.0 and 0.8.200.1.0).

• Conversion from simple_triplet_matrix is now supported (Serguei Sokol in #192).

• Updated configure code to check for g++ 5.4 or later to enable OpenMP.

• Updated the skeleton package to current packaging standards

• Suppress warnings from Armadillo about missing OpenMP support and -fopenmp flags by setting ARMA_DONT_PRINT_OPENMP_WARNING

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.