[Rcpp-devel] [Pre-ANN] RcppArmadillo 0.8.499.0.2 with Armadillo 8.500.rc1

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

A few days ago Conrad announced the first release candidate of what will
become Armadillo 8.500; we wrapped this up as RcppArmadillo 0.8.499.0.2 (with
a different version so allow for clean sorting and upgrades).

It contains a number of sparse matric improvements and new features, and
Keith O'Hara cleaned up our interfacing with 'limited' LAPACK libraries (such
as the one R ships with) improved.

This release is ready via GitHub and in the RcppCore drat repo, so please
help by testing it. I ran two full reverse-dependency checks and found no
issues.  You can install 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 0.8.499.0.2 (2018-03-29)

-   Upgraded to Armadillo release 8.500.rc1 (8.500 rc1)

    -   faster element access in sparse matrices

    -   faster row iterators for sparse matrices

    -   faster handling of compound expressions by `trace()`

    -   expanded `normalise()` to handle sparse matrices

    -   expanded `.transform()` and `.for_each()` to handle sparse
        matrices

    -   added `reverse()` for reversing order of 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)).

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