RcppArmadillo 14.6.3-1 on CRAN: Minor Upstream Bug Fixes

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:31:00 CDT

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1268 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 41 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 642 times according to Google Scholar.

Conrad made three minor bug fix releases since the 4.6.0 release last month. We need to pace releases at CRAN so we do not immediately upload there on each upstream release—and then CRAN also had the usual (and well-deserved) summer rest leading to a slight delay relative to the last upstream. The minor changes in the three releases are summarized below. All our releases are always available via the GitHub repo and hence also via r-universe, and still rigorously tested via our own reverse-dependency checks. We also note that the package once again passed with flying colours and no human intervention which remains impressive given the over 1200 reverse dependencies.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.6.3-1 (2025-08-14)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.6.3 (Caffe Mocha)

Fix OpenMP related crashes in Cube::slice() on Arm64 CPUs

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.6.2-1 (2025-08-08) (GitHub Only)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.6.2 (Caffe Mocha)

Fix for corner-case speed regression in sum()

Better handling of OpenMP in omit_nan() and omit_nonfinite()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.6.1-1 (2025-07-21) (GitHub Only)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.6.1 (Caffe Mocha)

Fix for speed regression in mean()

Fix for detection of compiler configuration

Use of pow optimization now optional

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.