A new version, now at 0.2.1, of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself) is now on CRAN.

This version has only internal changes. Brian Ripley, tireless as always, is testing the impact of gcc 10 on CRAN code and found that the ‘to-be-default’ option -fno-common throws off a few (older) C code bases, this one (which is indeed old) included. So in a nutshell, we declared all global variables extern and defined them once and only once in new file globals.c. Needless to say, this affects the buildability options. In the past we used to rely on an external library libdieharder (which e.g. I had put together for Debian) but we now just build everything internally in the package.

Which builds on the changes in RDieHarder 0.2.0 which I apparently had not blogged about when it came out on December 21 last year. I had refactored the package to use either the until-then-required-but-now-optional external library, or the included library code. Doing so meant more builds on more systems including Windows.

This (very old) package has no NEWS.Rd file to take a summary from, but the ChangeLog file has all the details.

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff from 0.2.1 to 0.2.0. or the older diff from 0.2.0 to 0.1.4.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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