RcppAnnoy 0.0.23 on CRAN: Several Updates

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:55:00 CDT

A new release, now at version 0.0.22, of RcppAnnoy has arrived on CRAN, just a little short of two years since the previous release.

RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours—originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery algorithm. It had all the buzzwords already a decade ago: it is one of the algorithms behind (drum roll …) vector search as it finds approximate matches very quickly and also allows to persist the data.

This release contains three contributed pull requests covering a new metric, a new demo and quieter compilation, some changes to documentation and last but not least general polish including letting the vignette now use the Rcpp::asis builder.

Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in version 0.0.23 (2026-01-12)

Add dot product distance metrics (Benjamin James in #78)

Apply small polish to the documentation (Dirk closing #79)

A new demo() has been added (Samuel Granjeaud in #79)

Switch to Authors@R in DESCRIPTION

Several updates to continuous integration and README.md

Small enhancements to package help files

Updates to vignettes and references

Vignette now uses Rcpp::asis builder (Dirk in #80)

Switch one macro to a function to avoid a compiler nag (Amos Elberg in #81)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.