[Rcpp-devel] [Quasi-ANN] RcppArmadillo 0.8.500.0 with Armadillo 8.500

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Conrad has released Armadillo 8.500, and I wrapped this up as version
0.8.500.0 of RcppArmadillo which had seen quite some testing via two
pre-releases with proper reverse depensd checks.

There are a number of nice new things in here, particularly for sparse
matrices, and some other Armadillo changes as well as setup improvements
(with special thanks to Keith O'Hara who has been very helpful).  See below
for fuller details.

The release is in the queue at CRAN, but as RcppArmadillo is used by over 460
packages, CRAN will do some testing too -- and then we have of course the
pending R 3.5.0 release on Monday.  So this may take a moment to get released
at CRAN.

But as this release is also available ready via GitHub and the RcppCore drat
repo, you can install it now from the drat repo at

      http://rcppcore.github.io/drat/

via a simple

      drat::addRepo("RcppCore")
      install.packages("RcppArmadillo")

or even just

      install.packages("RcppArmadillo", type="source",
                       repo="https://RcppCore.github.io/drat")

Thanks,  Dirk



### 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](https://github.com/RcppCore/RcppArmadillo/pull/211)
    addressing
    [\#207](https://github.com/RcppCore/RcppArmadillo/issues/207)).

-   The configure check for LAPACK features has been updated accordingly
    (Keith O'Hara in
    [\#214](https://github.com/RcppCore/RcppArmadillo/pull/214)
    addressing
    [\#213](https://github.com/RcppCore/RcppArmadillo/issues/213)).

-   The compile-time check for `g++` is now more robust to minimal shell
    versions
    ([\#217](https://github.com/RcppCore/RcppArmadillo/pull/217)
    addressing
    [\#216](https://github.com/RcppCore/RcppArmadillo/issues/216)).

-   Compiler tests to were added for macOS (Keith O'Hara in
    [\#219](https://github.com/RcppCore/RcppArmadillo/pull/219)).



-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org