RcppArmadillo release 0.8.500.0, originally prepared and uploaded on April 21, has hit CRAN today (after having already been available via the RcppCore drat repo). A corresponding Debian release will be prepared as well. This RcppArmadillo release contains Armadillo release 8.500.0 with a number of rather nice changes (see below for details), and continues our normal bi-monthly CRAN release cycle.

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) 472 other packages on CRAN.

A high-level summary of changes follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.8.500.0 (2018-04-21)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 8.500 (Caffeine Raider)

  • faster handling of sparse matrices by kron() and repmat()

  • faster transpose of sparse matrices

  • faster element access in sparse matrices

  • faster row iterators for sparse matrices

  • faster handling of compound expressions by trace()

  • more efficient handling of aliasing in submatrix views

  • expanded normalise() to handle sparse matrices

  • expanded .transform() and .for_each() to handle sparse matrices

  • added reverse() for reversing order of elements

  • added repelem() for replicating elements

  • added roots() for finding the roots of a polynomial

• Fewer LAPACK compile-time guards are used, new unit tests for underlying features have been added (Keith O’Hara in #211 addressing #207).

• The configure check for LAPACK features has been updated accordingly (Keith O’Hara in #214 addressing #213).

• The compile-time check for g++ is now more robust to minimal shell versions (#217 addressing #216).

• Compiler tests to were added for macOS (Keith O’Hara in #219).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. 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.