Team Rcpp is excited to share that an brandnew new version 1.1.2 of Rcpp is now on CRAN, has also been uploaded to Debian, and has already built for r2u and r-universe; Windows etc builds at CRAN should follow in due course. Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 3236 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. On CRAN, 13.4% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 61.4% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 121.6 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 2263 (JSS, 2011) and 471 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 742. The is the second update in the 1.1.* series which had, among other changes, switched to C++11 as the minimum standard. This release continues as usual with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. Interim snapshots are always available via the r-universe page and repo. We continue to strongly encourage the use of these development released and their testing we tend to run our systems with them too. Having said that, we would like to reiterate that we strongly object to the upstream R release and change management which in this 4.6.* cycle made several abrupt changes forcing packages which consume header files to make very abrupt change. Rcpp, just like numerous other CRAN packages demonstrates that API changes can be undertaken responsibly in a managed manner which allows for transition periods followed by possible warning periods, deprecations periods and finally (but only at long last) errors. What happened here is a speed run to the final stage of forced errors. Uncool and irritating for something as widely used as R. This forced us to make an interim release 1.1.1-1.1 even though we have of course had a policy of always keeping properly tested, installable, and error-free releases candidate version in the main repository branch and hence available via R-universe tested packages for all relevant platforms, and even via binaries for most (including Ubuntu LTS). It would be nice if R Core found a way to take advantage of this. Maybe development cycles, running apart for a year as they do for R, should also include selected packages. Once again I am not attempting to summarize the different changes. The full list follows below and details all these changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.1.2 (2026-07-01)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Use of execinfo.h is again conditional to avoid build complexity (Dirk in #1445 addressing #1442)
  • An internal state component for Datetime is now int (Dirk in #1448 and #1449 fixing #1447)
  • Three new (in R 4.6.0) attribute accessors are used conditionally (Dirk in #1450 closing #1432)
  • An UBSAN error in the Sugar-based NA comparison has been corrected (I aki in #1453 fixing #1452)
  • Treatment of Inf outside of integer range in Sugar function has been corrected (I aki in #1458 fixing #1455)
  • Integer overflow protection has been added for sugar functions (I aki in #1457 fixing #1454)
  • The parent environment is now accessed via R_ParentEnv (Dirk in #1460 fixing #1459)
  • Change to returning dataptr again for better handling of empty vectors (I aki in #1462 fixing #1461)
  • Undefined behavior errors in use of ListOf proxies have been addressed (I aki in #1464 fixing #1463)
  • Under newer R version, R_UnboundValue is no longer used (I aki in #1466 fixing #1465)
  • New R API access point R_getRegisteredNamespace() is used with current R versions (Dirk in #1469 fixing #1468)
  • The Nullable::as() exporter now uses an explicit cast to the templated type (Dirk in #1471 fixing #1470)
  • A memory leak in the variadic Rcpp::warning() template has been fixed (Kevin in #1475 fixing #1474)
  • The Nullable::operatorT() has been added as a 'opt-out' (Dirk in #1477 with coordination in #1472)
  • Add templated integer-index overload for operator[] on small systems such as WASM (Jeroen Ooms in #1482)
  • The attribute accessors in AttributeProxyPolicy no longer rely on get__() (Kevin in #1484 fixing #1483)
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • Reference in the bibliography used by the package vignettes have been updated.
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • Excute permissions are set consistently on scripts with shebangs (Mattias Ellert in #1467)
  • R 4.5.* has been added to the CI matrix (Dirk in #1476)
  • Three nag messages issued when obsolete build flag accessors are used now show Rcpp::: (Dirk in #1480 fixing #1456)
  • Reference GitHub Actions have been updated to their current versions (Dirk in #1481)
• Non-release Changes:
  • A non-release hotfix 1.1.1-1 used by CRAN accommodates breaking changes to the API in R 4.6.0. It would be nice to have the same level of release management in R itself that CRAN expects from us.

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous interim release along with pre-releases 1.1.1-1 and 1.1.1-1.1 that were needed because R-devel once again sudden decided to move fast and break things. Not our doing. And there also should not have been a need to two such uploads but it was amateur hour all around. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub discussion or issue section, or the Rcpp list. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well. GitHub offers decent search for issue, pull requests and discussions; as many topics have been covered it is worth checking as well.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

A third release of the crc32c package is now on CRAN. The package bring the Google library crc32c to R and offers cyclical checksums with parity in hardware-accelerated form on (recent enough) intel cpus as well as on arm64. This release is one hundred percent maintenance. Brian Ripley reached out as he already tests the (still very much unreleased) cmake 4.0.0 release, currently at rc5. And that version is now picky about minimum cmake version statements in CMakeLists.txt. As we copied the upstream one here, with its setting of the jurassic 3.1 version, our build conked out. A simple switch to 3.5..4.0, declaring a from .. to scheme with a minimally supported version (here 3.5, released in 2016) up to a tested version works. No other changes, really, besides an earlier helping hand from Jeroen concerning cross-compilation support he needed or encountered (and that happened right after the 0.0.2 release). The NEWS entry for this (as well the initial release) follows.

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2025-03-25)

• Support cross-compilation by setting CC and CXX in Makevars.in (Jeroen Ooms in #1)
• Support pre-release 4.0.0 of cmake by moving the minimum stated version from 3.1 to 3.5 per CRAN request, also sent PR upstream

My CRANberries service provides a comparison to the previous release. The code is available via the GitHub repo, and of course also from its CRAN page and via install.packages("crc32c"). Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

A new minor release 0.4.25 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN this morning, and has just now been uploaded to Debian too. QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for nearly twenty-two years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded to CRAN. This release of RQuantLib is tickled by a request to remove bashisms in shell scripts, or, as in my case here, configure.ac where I used the non-portable form of string comparison. That has of course been there for umpteen years and not bitten anyone as the default shell for most is in fact bash but the change has the right idea. And is of course now mandatory affecting quite a few packages is I tooted yesterday. It also contains an improvement to the macOS 14 build kindly contributed by Jeroen.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.25 (2025-03-24)

• Support macOS 14 with a new compiler flag (Jeroen in #190)
• Correct two bashisms in configure.ac

One more note, though: This may however be the last release I make with Windows support. CRAN now also checks for forbidden symbols (such as assert or (s)printf or ) in static libraries, and this release tickled one such warning from the Windows side (which only uses static libraries). I have no desire to get involved in also maintaing QuantLib (no R here) for Windows and may simply turn the package back to OS_type: unix to avoid the hassle. To avoid that, it would be fabulous if someone relying on RQuantLib on Windows could step up and lend a hand looking after that library build. Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

A new release 0.1.7 of RcppZiggurat is now on the CRAN network for R. This marks the first release in four and a half years. The RcppZiggurat package updates the code for the Ziggurat generator by Marsaglia and others which provides very fast draws from a Normal distribution. The package provides a simple C++ wrapper class for the generator improving on the very basic macros, and permits comparison among several existing Ziggurat implementations. This can be seen in the figure where Ziggurat from this package dominates accessing the implementations from the GSL, QuantLib and Gretl all of which are still way faster than the default Normal generator in R (which is of course of higher code complexity). This release brings a number of changes. Notably, based on the work we did with the new package zigg (more on that in a second), we now also expose the Exponential generator, and the underlying Uniform generator. Otherwise many aspects of the package have been refreshed: updated builds, updated links, updated CI processes, more use of DOIs and more. The other big news is zigg which should now be the preference for deployment of Ziggurat due to its much lighter-weight and zero-dependency setup. The NEWS file entry below lists all changes.

Changes in version 0.1.7 (2025-03-22)

• The CI setup was updated to use run.sh from r-ci (Dirk).
• The windows build was updated to GSL 2.7, and UCRT support was added (Jeroen in #16).
• Manual pages now use JSS DOIs for references per CRAN request
• README.md links and badges have been updated
• Continuous integration actions have been updated several times
• The DESCRIPTION file now uses Authors@R as mandated
• Use of multiple cores is eased via a new helper function reflecting option mc.core or architecture defaults, used in tests
• An inline function has been added to avoid a compiler nag
• Support for exponential RNG draws zrexp has been added, the internal uniform generator is now also exposed via zruni
• The vignette bibliography has been updated, and switched to DOIs
• New package zigg is now mentioned in DESCRIPTION and vignette

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the Rcppziggurat page or the GitHub repository.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

A new minor release 0.4.21 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN this afternoon, and has already been uploaded to Debian as well. QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for more than twenty years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded there. This release of RQuantLib benefits from some kind attention that Jeroen has been paying to how we build (especially at CRAN) on both macOS and Windows. So the build processes are a little better now, and no internal code changed. QuantLib 1.33 built unchanged.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.21 (2024-02-01)

• Generalize macOS build to universal build (Jeroen in #179)
• Generalize Windows build to arm64 (Jeroen in #181)
• Generalize version string use to support cmake use (Jeroen in #181 fixing #180)
• Minor update to 'ci.yaml' github action (Dirk)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

The x13binary team is thrilled to share the availability of Release 1.1.60-1 of the x13binary package providing the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau which arrived on CRAN earlier today. This release brings the package up to speed with the most current release by the Census Bureau. More importantly, we finally made good on an old promise to ourselves and now install the binary by compiling from its Fortran sources! No more pre-made binaries. This required some work by Kirill, Michael, and Jeroen to finalize matter because, as we all know, the CRAN build processes and tool chains can be a little byzantine in their details. Use on platforms not covered by binaries from CRAN (or r-universe) should just work too as the demands on the (Fortran) compiler are fairly standard. All in all the build is fairly lightweight and quick even when rebuilding from source. Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release showing changes to the previous release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

A new release 0.4.18 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and will be uploaded to Debian as well. QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language. This release of RQuantLib comes about six months after the previous maintenance release. It brings a few small updates triggered by small changes in the QuantLib releases 1.29 and 1.30. It also contains updates reflecting changes in the rgl package kindly contributed by Duncan Murdoch. Last but not least, Jeroen Ooms helped with two pull requests updating builds on, repspectively, macOS and Windows by updating the pre-made libraries of QuantLib.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.18 (2023-05-01)

• Use of several rgl functions was updated to a new naming scheme in the package (kindly contributed by Duncan Murdoch in #174)
• A default argument is now given for option surface plots
• Changed call from SwaptionVolCube1 to SabrSwaptionVolatilityCube (conditional on using QuantLib 1.30 or later)
• Some other deprecation warnings were tweaked as in QL test file
• Builds for macOS and Windows were updated with more library build (changes kindly contributed by Jeron Ooms in #176 and #175)
• Some remaining throw calls were replace by Rcpp::stop

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the new rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint that took place on December 2-3-4 2022. Many thanks to those who participated, namely:

• tienne Mollier (emollier)
• Taihsiang Ho (tai271828)
• Athos Ribeiro (athos)
• Stuart Prescott (stuart)
• Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo)
• Ileana Dumitrescu (ildumi)
• James Valleroy (jvalleroy)
• Emmanuel Arias (eamanu)
• Kurt Kremitzki (kkremitzki)
• Mohammed Bilal (rmb)
• Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed)
• Jeroen Ploemen (jcfp)

Here is a list of issues we worked on: pybuild autodep8 feature About a year ago, Antonio Terceiro contributed code to pybuild to make it possible to automatically run the upstream test suite as autopkgtests. This feature has now been merged and uploaded to unstable. Although you can find out more about it in the pybuild-autopkgtest manpage, an email providing more details should be sent to the debian-python mailing list relatively soon. Fixing packages that run tests via python3 setup.py test Last August, Stefano Rivera poked the team about the deprecation of the python3 setup.py test command to run tests in pybuild. Although this feature has been deprecated upstream for 6 years now, many packages in the archive still use it to run the upstream test suite during build. Around 29 of the 67 packages that are team-maintained by the Debian Python Team were fixed during the sprint. Ideally, all of them would be before the feature is removed from pybuild. if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Fixing packages that use nose nose, provided by the python3-nose package, is an obsolete testing framework for Python and has been unmaintained since 2015. During the sprint, people worked on fixing some of the many bugs filled against packages still running tests via nose, but there are still around 240 packages affected by this issue in the archive. Again, if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Removal of the remaining Python2 packages With the upload of dh-python 5.20221202, Stefano Rivera officially removed support for dh_python2 and dh_pypy, thus closing the "Python2 removal in sid/bullseye" bug. It seems some work still needs to be done for complete Python2 removal from Sid, but I expect this will be done in time for the Bookworm release. Working on Lintian tags for the Team During the sprint, I managed to work on some Lintian issues that we had targeted, namely:

• the addition of a "missing-cpython-extension" tag to flag packages that do not build CPython extensions for all the supported Python versions.
• fixing a false-positive in the "missing-prerequisite-for-pyproject-backend" tag.

I also worked on a few other Lintian tags, but they were unrelated to the Debian Python Team itself. I'm also happy to report many of the tags I wrote for the team in the past few months were merged by the awesome Russ Allbery and should land in unstable as soon as a new release is made. I'm particularly looking forward the new "uses-python-distutils" tag that should help us flag packages that still use the deprecated distutils library. Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs It's often hard to have a good overview of pending merge requests when working with team-maintained packages, as by default, Salsa doesn't notify anyone when a MR is opened. Although our workflow typically does not involve creating merge requests, some people still do and they end up sitting there, unnoticed. During the sprint, Kurt Kremitzki worked on solving this issue by having distro-tracker show the pending MRs on our team's tracker page. Sadly, it seems little progress was made, as the removal of python3-django-jsonfield from the archive and breaking changes in python3-selenium has broken the test suite. Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one pybuild has been supporting building with PEP-517 style pyproject.toml files via a generic plugin (pybuild-plugin-pyproject) for a while now. As this plugin supersedes the old flit plugin, we've been thinking of deprecating it in time for the Bookworm release. To make this possible, most of the packages in the archive that still used this plugin were migrated to the generic one and I opened bugs on the last handful of packages that were not team-maintained. Other work Many other things were done during the sprint, such as:

• improving existing packages (for example, adding or fixing autopkgtests)
• triaging and fixing Python 3.11 bugs
• updating packages to the latest upstream release
• sponsoring uploads

Thanks Thanks again to everyone who joined the sprint, and three big cheers for all the folks who donate to Debian and made it possible for us to have a food budget for the event.

A new release 0.4.18 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ( ProtoBuf ) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. This release, the first since March of last year, contains two contributed pull requests improving or extending the package, some internal maintance updating the CI setup as well as retiring an old-yet-unused stub interface for RPC, as well as an update for UCRT builds on Windows. The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has more details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.18 (2021-12-15)

• Support string_view in FindMethodByName() (Adam Cozzette in #72).
• CI use was updated first at Travis, later at GitHub and now uses r-ci (Dirk in #74 and (parts of) #76).
• The (to the best of our knowledge) unused minimal RPC mechanism has been removed, retiring one method and one class as well as the import of the RCurl package (Dirk in #76).
• The toJSON() method supports two (upstream) formatting toggles (Vitali Spinu in #79 with minor edit by Dirk).
• Windows UCRT builds are now supported (Jeroen in #81, Dirk and Tomas Kalibera in #82).

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the quick overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

A new minor release of RcppRedis arrived on CRAN, the first update since the last release in January of last year. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads for several years now. This release updates CI to using r-ci, adds a quit() methods, and updates the windows library in builds thanks to a PR by Jeroen which also enables builds under the experimemtal UCRT windows flavor.

Changes in version 0.1.11 (2021-06-26)

• The CI setup was updated to use run.sh from r-ci (Dirk).
• A new function quit can be used to close a connection (Dirk).
• The windows build was updated to libhiredis 1.0.0, and UCRT support was added (Jeroen in #42).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppRedis page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Release 0.3.9 of the RcppGSL package arrived at CRAN today, pretty much exactly one year since the last upload. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package. This release brings some small documentation and CI polish, and enables builds on the newer (and still experimental) windows UCRT flavor (which will bring native utf-8 chars to Windows, see this and this write-up) thanks to a PR by Jeroen.

Changes in version 0.3.9 (2021-06-23)

• The pdf vignette was extended by a small subsection (Dirk).
• The CI setup was updated to use run.sh from r-ci (Dirk).
• The windows was updated to GSL 2.7, and UCRT support was added (Jeroen in #28).

Courtesy of CRANberries, a summary of changes to the most recent release is also available. More information is on the RcppGSL page. Questions, comments etc should go to the issue tickets at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Jeroen Ploemen (jcfp)
• Mark Hindley (leepen)
• Scarlett Moore (sgmoore)
• Baptiste Beauplat (lyknode)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Gunnar Ingemar Hjalmarsson
• Stephan Lachnit

Congratulations!

The twelveth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN this morning, following two days of testing at CRAN preceded by five full reverse-depends checks we did (and which are always logged in this GitHub repo). The Debian package has been built and uploaded; Windows and macOS binaries should follow at CRAN as usual. This 0.12.12 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, the 0.12.7 release in September, the 0.12.8 release in November, the 0.12.9 release in January, the 0.12.10.release in March, and the 0.12.11.release in May making it the sixteenth release at the steady and predictable bi-montly release frequency. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 1097 packages (and hence 71 more since the last release in May) on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 91 in BioConductor. This releases contain a fairly large number of fairly small and focused pull requests most of which either correct some corner cases or improve other aspects. JJ tirelessly improved the package registration added in the previous release and following R 3.4.0. Kirill tidied up a number of small issues allowing us to run compilation in even more verbose modes---usually a good thing. Jeroen, Elias Pipping and Yo Gong all contributed as well, and we thank everybody for their contributions. All changes are listed below in some detail.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.12 (2017-07-13)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • The tinyformat.h header now ends in a newline (#701).
  • Fixed rare protection error that occurred when fetching stack traces during the construction of an Rcpp exception (Kirill M ller in #706).
  • Compilation is now also possibly on Haiku-OS (Yo Gong in #708 addressing #707).
  • Dimension attributes are explicitly cast to int (Kirill M ller in #715).
  • Unused arguments are no longer declared (Kirill M ller in #716).
  • Visibility of exported functions is now supported via the R macro atttribute_visible (Jeroen Ooms in #720).
  • The no_init() constructor accepts R_xlen_t (Kirill M ller in #730).
  • Loop unrolling used R_xlen_t (Kirill M ller in #731).
  • Two unused-variables warnings are now avoided (Jeff Pollock in #732).
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Execute tools::package_native_routine_registration_skeleton within package rather than current working directory (JJ in #697).
  • The R portion no longer uses dir.exists to no require R 3.2.0 or newer (Elias Pipping in #698).
  • Fix native registration for exports with name attribute (JJ in #703 addressing #702).
  • Automatically register init functions for Rcpp Modules (JJ in #705 addressing #704).
  • Add Shield around parameters in Rcpp::interfaces (JJ in #713 addressing #712).
  • Replace dot (".") with underscore ("_") in package names when generating native routine registrations (JJ in #722 addressing #721).
  • Generate C++ native routines with underscore ("_") prefix to avoid exporting when standard exportPattern is used in NAMESPACE (JJ in #725 addressing #723).

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. 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.

A new release 0.2.14 of RInside is now on CRAN and in Debian. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by Rcpp. It has been nearly two years since the last release, and a number of nice extensions, build robustifications and fixes had been submitted over this period---see below for more. The only larger and visible extension is both a new example and some corresponding internal changes to allow a readline prompt in an RInside application, should you desire it. RInside is stressing the CRAN system a little in that it triggers a number of NOTE and WARNING messages. Some of these are par for the course as we get close to R internals not all of which are "officially" in the API. This lead to the submission sitting a little longer than usual in incoming queue. Going forward we may need to find a way to either sanction these access point, whitelist them or, as a last resort, take the package off CRAN. Time will tell. Changes since the last release were:

Changes in RInside version 0.2.14 (2017-04-28)

• Interactive mode can use readline REPL ( ukasz aniewski-Wo k in #25, and Dirk in #26)
• Windows macros checks now uses _WIN32 (Kevin Ushey in #22)
• The wt example now links with libboost_system
• The Makevars file is now more robist (Mattias Ellert in #21)
• A problem with empty environment variable definitions on Windows was addressed (Jeroen Ooms in #17 addressing #16)
• HAVE_UINTPTR_T is defined only if not already defined
• Travis CI is now driven via run.sh from our forked r-travis

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page, or to issues tickets at 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.

The tenth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp just made it to the main CRAN repository providing GNU R with by now over 10,000 packages. Windows binaries for Rcpp, as well as updated Debian packages will follow in due course. This 0.12.10 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, the 0.12.7 release in September, the 0.12.8 release in November, and the 0.12.9 release in January --- making it the fourteenth release at the steady and predictable bi-montly release frequency. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 975 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by sixtynine packages over the two months since the last release -- or just over a package a day! The changes in this release are almost exclusively minor bugfixes and enhancements to documentation and features: James "coatless" Balamuta rounded out the API, I aki Ucar fixed a bug concerning one-character output, Jeroen Ooms allowed for finalizers on XPtr objects, Nathan Russell corrected handling of lower (upper) triangular matrices, Dan Dillon and I dealt with Intel compiler quirks for his algorithm.h header, and I added a C++17 plugin along with some (overdue!) documentation regarding the various C++ standards that are supported by Rcpp (which is in essence whatever your compiler supports, i.e., C++98, C++11, C++14 all the way to C++17 but always keep in mind what CRAN and different users may deploy).

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.10 (2017-03-17)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Added new size attribute aliases for number of rows and columns in DataFrame (James Balamuta in #638 addressing #630).
  • Fixed single-character handling in Rstreambuf (I aki Ucar in #649 addressing #647).
  • XPtr gains a parameter finalizeOnExit to enable running the finalizer when R quits (Jeroen Ooms in #656 addressing #655).
• Changes in Rcpp Sugar:
  • Fixed sugar functions upper_tri() and lower_tri() (Nathan Russell in #642 addressing #641).
  • The algorithm.h file now accomodates the Intel compiler (Dirk in #643 and Dan in #645 addressing issue #640).
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes
  • The C++17 standard is supported with a new plugin (used eg for g++-6.2).
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • An overdue explanation of how C++11, C++14, and C++17 can be used was added to the Rcpp FAQ.

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. 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.

About 10 months ago, we enabled an auto-decrufter in dak. Then after 3 months it had become the top 11th remover . Today, there are only 3 humans left that have removed more packages than the auto-decrufter impressively enough, one of them is not even an active FTP-master (anymore). The current score board:

 5371 Luca Falavigna
 5121 Alexander Reichle-Schmehl
 4401 Ansgar Burchardt
 3928 DAK's auto-decrufter
 3257 Scott Kitterman
 2225 Joerg Jaspert
 1983 James Troup
 1793 Torsten Werner
 1025 Jeroen van Wolffelaar
  763 Ryan Murray

For comparison, here is the number removals by year for the past 6 years:

 5103 2011
 2765 2012
 3342 2013
 3394 2014
 3766 2015  (1842 removed by auto-decrufter)
 2845 2016  (2086 removed by auto-decrufter)

Which tells us that in 2015, the FTP masters and the decrufter performed on average over 10 removals a day. And by the looks of it, 2016 will surpass that. Of course, the auto-decrufter has a tendency to increase the number of removed items since it is an advocate of remove early, remove often! . Data is from https://ftp-master.debian.org/removals-full.txt. Scoreboard computed as:

  grep ftpmaster: removals-full.txt   \
   perl -pe 's/.*ftpmaster:\s+//; s/\]$//;'   \
   sort   uniq -c   sort --numeric --reverse   head -n10

Removals by year computed as:

 grep ftpmaster: removals-full.txt   \
   perl -pe 's/.* (\d 4 ) \d 2 :\d 2 :\d 2 .*/$1/'   uniq -c   tail -n6

(yes, both could be done with fewer commands)
Filed under: Debian

A new minor release of RQuantLib was released onto CRAN and into Debian. It takes advantages of some changes from last week's QuantLib release 1.7. Particularly noteworthy is the addition of support for intra-daily times in QuantLib based on work by Klaus Spanderen. If QuantLib was configured with the -enable-intraday option, we use the higher granularity of the time representation in all option pricers and implied volatility calculations. The impact of this feature is illustrated in the graph below. The graph shows the valuation of a Call option, European expiry, struck at the money with sensible short rate, dividend yield and volatility. We vary the time to expiry from five days to zero in steps of a quarter day. In darker blue is the correct valuation declining in parabolic shape. In lighter blue is what we get with QuantLib up to release 1.6, or newer releases configured without intra-day time support: an ugly step function that is off, and increasingly so we approach the expiration. Which leads to an appeal: a volunteer is needed to update the QuantLib 1.7 build for Windows. Jeroen tried, but ran into a snag and out of time. If you can help, please get in touch to Jeroen and myself. We suspect that the largest part of RQuantLib users relies on the prebuilt binaries from CRAN, and it would nice to have these updated to the current version of QuantLib. The full changes are detailed below.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.2 (2015-12-03)

• Changes in RQuantLib code:
  • Intra-day times are now available if QuantLib 1.7 or later is used, and has been configured with --enable-intraday
  • New helper functions getQuantLibVersion() and getQuantLibCapabilties()
  • New package startup code detects and warns about outdated QuantLib versions, or missing intra-day capability, unless not interactive.
  • The missing Monthly parameter has been added to matchFrequency (fixing issue ticket #19)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Issue tickets can be filed at 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.

Following on yesterday's announcement of RcppCCTZ, what is the only thing better than another date, time, or timezones library package? One that works on Solaris too :) Bradley White from CCTZ upstream spotted the failed compilation on the machine in Oxford and suggested a quick fix. Jeroen quickly tested what I had put into a branch, and there we have it: version 0.0.2 which now builds everywhere. Changes (for both releases) are summarized here:

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2015-12-02)

• Additional #ifdef statements suggested by Bradley White in CCTZ ticket #5 permitting compilation on Solaris with thanks to Jeroen for testing our branch.

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2015-12-01)

• Initial CRAN upload.
• Package is functional and provides examples.

We now also have a diff to the previous version thanks to CRANberries. More details, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository.

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

A new release of my random package for truly (hardware-based) random numbers as provided by random.org is now on CRAN. The main change is a switch to the curl() function from the eponymous package by Jeroen Ooms. This was caused by random.org now using https instead of http, annd the fact that te url() function from R does not cope well with the redirect. Besides this (enforced) change, everything else remains the same. Courtesy of CRANberries comes a diffstat report for this release. Current and previous releases are available here as well as on CRAN.

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

A new release 0.4.2 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects. Murray and Jeroen did almost all of the heavy lifting. Many changes were triggered by two helpful referee reports, and we are slowly getting to the point where we will resubmit a much improved paper. Full details are below.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.2 (2014-12-10)

• Address changes suggested by anonymous reviewers for our Journal of Statistical Software submission.
• Make Descriptor and EnumDescriptor objects subsettable with "[[".
• Add length() method for Descriptor objects.
• Add names() method for Message, Descriptor, and EnumDescriptor objects.
• Clarify order of returned list for descriptor objects in as.list documentation.
• Correct the definition of as.list for EnumDescriptors to return a proper list instead of a named vector.
• Update the default print methods to use cat() with fill=TRUE instead of show() to eliminate the confusing [1] since the classes in RProtoBuf are not vectorized.
• Add support for serializing function, language, and environment objects by falling back to R's native serialization with serialize_pb and unserialize_pb to make it easy to serialize into a Protocol Buffer all of the more than 100 datasets which come with R.
• Use normalizePath instead of creating a temporary file with file.create when getting absolute path names.
• Add unit tests for all of the above.

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. RProtoBuf page which has a draft package vignette, a a 'quick' overview vignette, and a unit test summary vignette. 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.