[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)).