This morning, digest version 0.6.20 went to CRAN, and I will send a package to Debian shortly as well. digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, and spookyhash algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. This version contains only internal changes with a switch to the (excellent) tinytest package. This now allows you, dear user of the package, to run tinytest::test_package("digest") at any point post-installation to reassure yourself that all standard assertions and tests are still met in y ..read more

A new release 0.4.14 of RProtoBuf is arriving at CRAN. 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 contains two very helpful pull requests by Jarod Meng that solidify behaviour in two corner cases of message translation. Jeroen also updated the Windows build settings which will help with the upcoming transition to a new Rtools version. Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.14 (2019-0 ..read more

rvw 0.6.0: First release rvw 0.6.0: First release Note: Crossposted by Ivan, James and myself. Today Dirk Eddelbuettel, James Balamuta and Ivan Pavlov are happy to announce the first release of a reworked R interface to the Vowpal Wabbit machine learning system. Started as a GSoC 2018 project, the new rvw package was built to give R users easier access to a variety of efficient machine learning algorithms. Key features that promote this idea and differentiate the new rvw from existing Vowpal Wabbit packages in R are: A reworked interface that simplifies model manipulations (dire ..read more

A new RcppTOML release is now on CRAN. RcppTOML brings TOML to R. TOML is a file format that is most suitable for configurations, as it is meant to be edited by humans but read by computers. It emphasizes strong readability for humans while at the same time supporting strong typing as well as immediate and clear error reports. On small typos you get parse errors, rather than silently corrupted garbage. Much preferable to any and all of XML, JSON or YAML – though sadly these may be too ubiquitous now. TOML has been making inroads with projects such as the Hugo static blog compiler, or the Cargo ..read more

The fourth release of the binb package just arrived on CRAN. binb regroups four rather nice themes for writing LaTeX Beamer presentations much more easily in in (R)Markdown. As a teaser, a quick demo combining all four themes follows; documentation and examples are in the package. This release brings a few nice pull requests. Rob Hyndman, improved the Monash theme. Johan Larsson added support for slide notes, pgfpages and beamer options. Joseph Stachelek corrected the date setting in the Presento theme to reflect the date from the YAML header. Changes in binb version 0.0.4 (2018-06-23) The M ..read more

A new minor release of the anytime package is arriving on CRAN. This is the fifteenth release, and first since the 0.3.3 release in November. anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to either POSIXct or Date objects – and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples. This release is mostly internal and switches to the excellent new tinytest package, a tweak the iso8601() format helper which now uses T between date and t ..read more

A new RcppArmadillo release based on a new Armadillo upstream release arrived on CRAN, and will get to Debian shortly. It brings a few upstream changes, including extened interfaces to LAPACK following the recent gcc/gfortran issue. See below for more details. 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) 610 other packages on CRAN. Changes in RcppA ..read more

Welcome to the 22nd post in the reasonably rational R recommendations series, or R4 for short. This post premieres something new: a matching video in lightning talk style: The topic is something we had mentioned a few times before in this r^4 blog series, for example in this post on finding deb packages as well as in this post on binary installations. Binaries rocks, where available, and Michael Rutter’s PPAs should really be known and used more widely. Hence the video and supporting slides ..read more

The nineth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the thirteen-ish year history as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later. littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. And it is (in my very biased eyes) better as it allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript converted to only more recently. littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-anothe ..read more

Another minor maintenance release of the nanotime package for working with nanosecond timestamps arrived on CRAN yesterday. nanotime uses the RcppCCTZ package for (efficient) high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it now uses a more rigorous S4-based approach thanks to a rewrite by Leonardo Silvestri. This release adds the [[ accessor; this had not come up before in direct use or via data.table (which, to its credit, has supported nanotime for years alread ..read more