RcppSimdJson 0.1.14 on CRAN: New Upstream Major

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 09:52:00 CDT

A brand new release 0.1.14 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN.

RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.

This version includes the new major upstream release 4.0.0 with major new features including a ‘builder’ for creating JSON from the C++ side objects. This is something a little orthogonal to the standard R usage of the package to parse and load JSON data but could still be of interest to some.

The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.14 (2025-09-13)

simdjson was upgraded to version 4.0.0 (Dirk in #96

Continuous integration now relies a token for codecov.io

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.