This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
The ‘Writing R Extensions’ Texinfo source now contains very experimental annotations for more clearly identifying the API status of C entry points. These annotations are used to produce indices for API, experimental API, and embedded API entry points in the rendered versions. This is very preliminary and may be dropped if a better approach emerges.
Also now for Fortran-callable entry points which are part of the API.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ (and hence ‘check’) now by default compile C++ code with ‘-DR_NO_REMAP’. For the time being this can be reverted by setting environment variable‘_R_CXX_USE_NO_REMAP_’ to a false value (but that will be removed in the near future).
`Writing R Extensions' has been revised to describe the remapped entry points, for with the ‘Rf_’ prefix remains optional when used from C code (but is recommended for new C code).
‘R CMD check’ now reports more warnings on long-deprecated/obsolete Fortran features reported by ‘gfortran -Wall’. For hints on how to modernize these, see <https://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Modernizing+Old+Fortran>.
The ‘sunspot.month’ data have been updated to Oct 2024; because of recalibration also historical numbers are changed, and we keep the previous data as ‘sunspot.m2014’ for reproducibility.
‘axisTicks(usr, ...)’ documentation clarification for ‘log=TRUE’, fixing bug PR#18821 thanks to Duncan Murdoch.
‘debug()’ and ‘debugonce(fun)’ now also accept a string ‘fun’ when it names an S4 generic, fixing PR#18822 thanks to Michael Jagan.
‘debugonce(<S4-simple-body>, signature=*)’ now works correctly when “called twice”, fixing PR#18824 thanks to Michael Jagan.
Strict R headers are now the default. This removes the legacy definitions of ‘PI’, ‘Calloc’, ‘Realloc’ and ‘Free’: use ‘M_PI’, ‘R_Calloc’, ‘R_Realloc’ or ‘R_Free’ instead.
_Pro tem_ ‘STRICT_R_HEADERS’ is defined in header ‘R_ext/RS.h’ if not already defined. This is not used in R itself and will be removed before release.
Header ‘R_ext/Constants.h’ (included by ‘R.h’) now always includes header ‘float.h’ or ‘cfloat’ for constants such as ‘DBL_MAX’
Defining ‘STRICT_R_HEADERS’ is now the default. This removes the legacy definitions of ‘PI’, ‘Calloc’, ‘Realloc’ and ‘Free’: use ‘M_PI’, ‘R_Calloc’, ‘R_Realloc’ or ‘R_Free’ instead.
Installation will define ‘STRICT_R_HEADERS’ if environment variable
‘_R_USE_STRICT_R_HEADERS_’ is set to a true value: this is done by ‘R
CMD check --as-cran’.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ (and hence ‘check’) now by default compile C++ code with ‘-DR_NO_REMAP’. For the time being this can be reverted by setting environment variable‘_R_CXX_USE_NO_REMAP_’ to a false value (but that will be removed in the near future).
The functions ‘R_strtod’ and ‘R_atof’ now allow hexadecimal constants
without an exponent, for compatibility with their C99 versions
(PR#18805).
The parser now accepts hexadecimal constants with a decimal point
without an exponent (taken as ‘p0’) as documented in
‘?NumericConstants’ (PR#18819).
The functions ‘R_strtod’ and ‘R_atof’ now allow hexadecimal constants without an exponent, for compatibility with their C99 versions (PR#18805).
The parser now accepts hexadecimal constants with a decimal point without an exponent (taken as ‘p0’) as documented in ‘?NumericConstants’ (PR#18819).
The functions ‘R_strtod’ and ‘R_atof’ now allow hexadecimal constants without an exponent, for compatibility with their C99 versions (PR#18805).
The parser now accepts hexadecimal constants with a decimal point without an exponent (taken as ‘p0’) as documented in ‘?NumericConstants’ (PR#18819).
Fixed URLs of the sun spots (‘sunspot.month’ etc) data sets and mention future changes due to recalibration.
‘kappa(A, exact=TRUE)’ for singular ‘A’ returns ‘Inf’ more generally, fixing PR#18817 reported by Mikael Jagan.
‘kappa(A, exact=TRUE)’ returns ‘Inf’ more generally, fixing PR#18817 reported by Mikael Jagan.
The functions ‘R_strtod’ and ‘R_atof’ now allow hexadecimal constants without an exponent, for compatibility with their C99 versions, (PR#18805)
Since almost all supported R versions now use UTF-8, ‘R CMD check’ no longer by default reports on marked UTF-8 or Latin-1 strings in character data. Set environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_PACKAGE_DATASETS_SUPPRESS_NOTES_’ to a false value for the previous behaviour.
Since almost all supported R versions now use UTF-8, ‘R CMD check’ no longer by default reports on marked UTF-8 or Latin-1 strings in character data. Set environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_PACKAGE_DATASETS_SUPPRESS_NOTES_’ to a false value for the previous behaviour.
Strings marked as ‘"bytes"’ now give a warning rather than a NOTE. These are better supplied as raw vectors.
‘seq.Date()’ no longer explicitly coerces results from integer to double, analogously with ‘seq.default()’, ‘seq.int()’ and ‘seq.POSIXt()’, resolving a _modified_ PR#18782.
‘getMethods(*, table=TRUE)’ is also deprecated.
‘available.packages()’ and ‘install.packages()’ get an optional switch ‘cache_user_dir’, somewhat experimentally.
Since almost all supported R versions now use UTF-8, ‘R CMD check’ no longer by default reports on marked UTF-8 or Latin-1 strings in character data. Set environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_PACKAGE_DATASETS_SUPPRESS_NOTES_’ to a false value for the previous behaviour.
Strings markaed as ‘"bytes"’ now give a warning rather than a NOTE. These are better supplied as raw vectors.
‘tools::checkDocFiles()’ notes more cases of usage documentation without corresponding \alias.
‘update_pkg_po()’ now copies ‘.mo’ files to the ‘translation’ package even if a ‘DESCRIPTION’ file exists, thanks to Michael Chirico fixing PR#18694.
Since all supported R versions now use UTF-8, ‘R CMD check’ no longer by default reports on marked strings in character data. Set environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_PACKAGE_DATASETS_SUPPRESS_NOTES_’ to a false value for the previous behaviour.
‘tools::checkDocFiles()’ now also notes _nullary_ functions shown in the usage section without corresponding \alias.
More R level messages use a common format containing ‘"character string"’ for more consistency and less translation work.
‘methods’' internal ‘.requirePackage()’ now re-enables primitive method
dispatch when needed; thanks to Ivan Krylov for demystifying CRAN
package check failures on the R-devel mailing lists.
‘methods’' internal ‘.requirePackage()’ now re-enables primitive method dispatch when needed; thanks to Ivan Krylov for demystifying CRAN package check failures on the R-devel mailing list.
The S-compatibility macros ‘F77_COM’ and ‘F77_COMDECL’ defined in header ‘R_ext/RS.h’ are deprecated and will be removed shortly. We could find no record of their use.
Mathlib function ‘lgammacor(x)’ no longer warns about underflow to zero for large ‘x’.
Text widths and heights were incorrectly reported by the Quartz device if the drawing context didn't exist yet (typically when drawing off-screen to a window that is yet to appear, see PR#18591).
The Quartz device could segfault in cases where paths with spaces are used in the new glyph drawing API. Thanks to Tomek Gieorgijewski (PR#18758).
On macOS in R CRAN builds, it is again possible to read little-endian UTF-16 text with a BOM from a connection using ‘encoding="UTF-16"’. Users building R from source should avoid using the system ‘libiconv’ in macOS 14.1 and later.
‘methods’ package internal ‘.requirePackage()’ now calls ‘requireNamespace(p)’ instead of ‘require(p)’, hence no longer adding packages to the ‘search()’ path in cases methods or class definitions are needed. Consequently, previous workflows relying on the old behaviour will have to be amended by adding corresponding ‘library(p)’ calls.
‘rowSums(A, dims = dd)’, ‘colMeans(..)’, etc, give a more helpful error message when ‘dd’ is not of length one, thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18811.
‘methods’' internal ‘.requirePackage()’ now re-enables primitive method dispatch when needed; thanks to Ivan Krylov for demystifying CRAN package check failures on the R-devel mailing lists.
The ‘xtfrm()’ method for class ‘"AsIs"’ is now considerably faster thanks to a patch provided by Ivan Krylov.
The ‘merge()’ method for data frames will no longer convert row names used for indexing using ‘I()’, which will lead to faster execution in cases where ‘sort = TRUE’ and ‘all.x’ and/or ‘all.y’ are set to ‘TRUE’.
On macOS in R CRAN builds, it is again possible to read little-endian UTF-16 text with a BOM from a connection using ‘encoding="UTF-16"’. Users building R from source should avoid using the system ‘libiconv’ in macOS 14.1 and later.
On macOS in R CRAN builds, it is again possible to read little-endian UTF-16 text with a BOM from a connection using ‘encoding="UTF-16"’. Users building R from source should avoid using the system libiconv in macOS 14.1 and later.
‘methods’' internal ‘.requirePackage()’ now re-enables primitive method dispatch when needed; thanks to Ivan Krylov for demystifying CRAN package check failures on the R*devel mailing lists.
‘R CMD check’ now reports more warnings on long-deprecated/obsolete Fortran features from ‘gfortran -Wall’. For hints on how to modernize these, see <https://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Modernizing+Old+Fortran>.
Added function ‘sha256sum()’ in package ‘tools’ analogous to ‘md5sum()’ implementing the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.
Added ‘sha256sum()’ analogous to ‘md5sum()’, but implementing the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.
‘md5sum()’ can be used to compute an MD5 hash of a raw vector of bytes by using the ‘bytes=’ argument instead of ‘files=’. The two arguments are mutually exclusive.
‘as(*, "raw")’ now works as documented, thanks to Mikael Jagan's PR#18795.
Informational messages of e.g., ‘print(1:1e4, max=1000)’, now correctly mention ‘max’ in addition to ‘getOption("max.print")’.
Failures in building the manuals under ‘doc’ now abort the installation, removing any file which caused the failure.
The deprecated S-compatibility macros ‘F77_COM’ and ‘F77_COMDECL’ have been removed from header ‘R_ext/RS.h’.
‘xyTable()’ now handles and reports ‘NA’s fixing PR#18654. Thanks to Heather Turner and Zhian Kamvar for report and patch.
The S-compatibility macros ‘F77_COM’ and ‘F77_COMDECL’ defined in header ‘R_ext/RS.h’ are deprecated and will be removed shortly. We could find no record of their use.
Failures in building the manuals under ‘doc’ now abort the installation, removing sny file which caused the failure.
The set operations now avoid the ‘as.vector()’ transformation for same-kind apparently vector-like operands.
‘get(nam, env)’ now signals a _classed_ error, ‘"getMissingError"’, as “subclass” of ‘"missingArgError"’ where the latter is used also in similar situations, e.g., ‘f <- function(x) exp(x); try(f())’ .
‘get(nam, env)’ now signals a _classed_ error (‘"getMissingError"’)
Printing ‘ls.str()’ now shows ‘"<missing>"’ even when R's language setting is not English.
‘Sys.setLanguage()’ now works in an ‘LC_ALL=C R’ session on some platforms, warns about _some_ failures to change the language and gets an option related to these warning messages.
‘pnorm(x)’ underflows more gracefully.
‘Sys.setLanguage()’ now works in an ‘LC_ALL=C R’ session on some platforms.
Printing ‘ls.str()’ now tries harder to show ‘"<missing>"’ even when R's language setting is not English.
‘stem()’ formats correctly also in cases where rounding up, e.g., from 9.96 to 10 needs more digits; thanks to Ella Kaye and Kelly Bodwin, fixing PR#8934 during ‘R Dev Day’ at useR!2024.
Additionally, ‘stem(x)’ now works normally also when ‘length(x) == 1’.
Package ‘tools’ now exports functions ‘base_aliases_db()’ and ‘base_rdxrefs_db()’.
Package ‘tools’ now exports functions ‘CRAN_current_db()’, ‘CRAN_aliases_db()’, ‘CRAN_rdxrefs_db()’, ‘CRAN_archive_db()’, and ‘CRAN_authors_db()’.
‘findInterval()’ gets new options ‘checkSorted’ and ‘checkNA’ which allow to skip relatively costly checks; related to PR#16567.
The legecy definition of ‘PI’ in ‘R_ext/Constants.h’ (included by
‘R.h’) will be removeed shortly: use ‘M_PI’ instead.
It is intended that ‘STRICT_R_HEADERS’ will become the default prior to release. This will remove the legacy definitions of ‘PI’, ‘Calloc’, ‘Realloc’ and ‘Free’: use ‘M_PI’, ‘R_Calloc’, ‘R_Realloc’ or ‘R_Free’ instead.
The set of LAPACK (double and complex) routines in API headers ‘R_ext/Lapack.h’ and ‘R_ext/Applic.h’ has been extended, mostly to routines actually in use from packages.
It is now possible to set the background color for row and column names in the data editor on Windows (‘Rgui’).
‘Rterm’ on Windows now accepts input lines of unlimited length.
‘file.info()’ on Windows now provides file owner name and domain.
‘Sys.info()’ on Windows now provides current user domain.
Installation will define ‘STRICT_R_HEADERS’ if environment variable ‘_R_USE_STRICT_R_HEADERS_’ is set to a true value: this is done by ‘R CMD check --as-cran’.
Header ‘R_ext/Constants.h’ (included by ‘R.h’) now includes header ‘float.h’ or ‘cfloat’ for constants such as ‘DBL_MAX’ even if ‘STRICT_R_HEADERS’ is defined.
The legecy definition of ‘PI’ in ‘R_ext/Constants.h’ (included by ‘R.h’) will be removeed shortly: use ‘M_PI’ instead.
The set of Lapack (double and complex) routines in API headers ‘R_ext/Lapack.h’ and ‘R_ext/Applic.h’ has been extended, mostly to routines actually in use from packages.
Package ‘tools’ now exports functions ‘R()’ and ‘parse_URI_reference()’.
Package ‘tools’ now exports functions ‘CRAN_current_db()’, ‘CRAN_aliases_db()’, ‘CRAN_rdxrefs_db()’, and ‘CRAN_archive_db()’.
‘grDevices::glyphInfo()’ gains ‘rot’ argument to allow per-glyph rotation. (Thanks to Daniel Sabanes Bove.)
Control of symbol visibility is now supported on macOS (the previous check only worked on ELF platforms).
Control of symbol visibility is now suported on macOS (the previous check only worked on ELF platforms).
Text widths and heights were incorrectly reported by the Quartz device if the drawing context didn't exist yet (typically when drawing off-screen to a window that is yet to appear, see PR#18591).
The Quartz device could segfault in cases where paths with spaces are used in the new glyph drawing API. Thanks to Tomek Gieorgijewski (PR#18758).
The Quartz device could segfault in cases where paths with spaces are
used in the new glyph drawing API. Thanks to Tomek Gieorgijewski
(PR#18758).
Mathlib function ‘lgammacor(x)’ no longer warns about underflow to zero for large ‘x’.
The Quartz device could segfault in cases where paths with spaces are used in the new glyph drawing API. Thanks to Tomek Gieorgijewski (PR#18758).
Package ‘citation()’ results auto-generated from the package metadata now also provide package DOIs for CRAN and Bioconductor packages.
Package ‘citation()’ results auto-generated from the package metadata
now also provide package DOIs for CRAN and Bioconductor packages.
Memory allocation messages now use the (non-standard notation) ‘"Mb"’, ‘"Gb"’ , ..., and ‘"Mbytes"’ strings as _arguments_ instead of as part of the (translatable format) string. This is one step for PR#18297; from Henrik Bengtsson.
‘tools’' ‘toTitleCase()’ now works better, fixing PR#18674, thanks to Shannon Pileggi, Sarah Zeller, Reiko Okamoto, and Hugo Gruson's ‘R Dev Day’ effort.
Printing matrices (typically with many rows and or columns) now also omits columns when desirable according to option ‘max.print’, or argument ‘max’, respectively. This is primarily the work of Lorena Abad, Ekaterina Akimova, Hanne Oberman, Abhishek Ulayil, and Lionel Henry at the ‘R Dev Day’, thus fixing PR#15027.
‘methods(<pkg>:::<genfun>)’ now does report methods when neither the generic nor the methods have been exported.
‘stem()’ correctly formats also in cases where rounding up, e.g., from 9.96 to 10 needs more digits; thanks to Ella Kaye and Kelly Bodwin, fixing PR#8934 during ‘R Dev Day’ at useR!2024.
‘pdf()’ gains an ‘author’ argument to set the corresponding metadata field, and logical arguments ‘timestamp’ and ‘producer’ to optionally omit the respective metadata. (Thanks to Edzer Pebesma.)
The Quartz device could segfault in cases where paths with spaces are used in the new glyph drawing API. Thanks to Tomek Gieorgijewski (PR#18758).
New ‘qr.influence()’ function, a “bare bones” interface to the ‘lm.influence()’ leave-one-out diagnostics computations; wished for in PR#18739.
New function ‘grepv()’ identical to ‘grep()’ except with the default ‘value = TRUE’.
Building the HTML (and Info) versions of the R manuals now requires ‘texi2any’ from Texinfo 6.1 or later.
‘R CMD check --as-cran’ notes bad parts in the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file's URL fields.
‘as.data.frame.list()’ gets a new option ‘new.names’ and now preserves ‘NA’ names, thus fixing the ‘format()’ method for data frames, and also bug PR#18745. Relatedly, the ‘format()’ method gets an option ‘cut.names’.
Additional non-API entry points added to those reported by ‘R CMD check’: ‘IS_LONG_VEC’, ‘PRCODE’, ‘PRENV’, ‘PRVALUE’, ‘R_nchar’, ‘Rf_NonNullStringMatch’, ‘R_shallow_duplicate_attr’, ‘Rf_StringBlank’, ‘SET_TYPEOF’, ‘TRUELENGTH’, ‘XLENGTH_EX’, and ‘XTRUELENGTH’.
New function ‘grepv’ identical to ‘grep’ except with the default ‘value = TRUE’.
Additional non-API entry points added to those reported by ‘R CMD check’: ‘IS_LONG_VEC’, ‘PRCODE’, ‘PRENV’, ‘PRVALUE’, ‘R_nchar’, ‘Rf_NonNullStringMatch’, ‘Rf_StringBlank’, ‘SET_TYPEOF’, ‘TRUELENGTH’, ‘XLENGTH_EX’, and ‘XTRUELENGTH’.
Package ‘citation()’ results auto-generated from the package metadata now also provide package DOIs for CRAN and Bioconductor packages.
‘as.data.frame.list()’ gets new option ‘new.names’ and now preserves ‘NA’ names, thus fixing the ‘format()’ method for data frames, and also bug PR#18745. Relatedly, the ‘format()’ method gets option ‘cut.names’.
Some ‘NOTE’s for use of non-API entry points have been upgraded to ‘WARNING’s in preparation for removing declarations and, where possible, hiding these entry points.
Some non-API entry points have been added to those reported by ‘R CMD check’: ‘COMPLEX0’, ‘ddfind’, ‘DDVAL’, ‘ENSURE_NAMEDMAX’, ‘ENVFLAGS’, ‘FRAME’, ‘HASHTAB’, ‘INTERNAL’, ‘IS_ASCII’, ‘IS_UTF8’, ‘LEVELS’, ‘NAMED’, ‘PRSEEN’, ‘RDEBUG’, ‘REAL0’, ‘Rf_findVarInFrame3’, ‘SET_BODY’, ‘SET_CLOENV’, ‘SET_FORMALS’, ‘SET_PRSEEN’, ‘SET_RDEBUG’, ‘STRING_PTR’, ‘SYMVALUE’, and ‘VECTOR_PTR’. Any declarations for these in public header files will be removed in the near future, and they will be hidden where possible.
‘Writing R Extensions’ has a new section ‘Moving into C API compliance’ to help package authors move away from using non-API endpoints. This section will continue to be updated as work on clarifying and tightening the C API continues.
Some non-API entry points have been added to those reported by ‘R CMD check’: ‘COMPLEX0’, ‘ddfind’, ‘DDVAL’, ‘ENSURE_NAMEDMAX’, ‘ENVFLAGS’, ‘FRAME’, ‘HASHTAB’, ‘INTERNAL’, ‘IS_ASCII’, ‘IS_UTF8’, ‘LEVELS’, ‘NAMED’, ‘PRSEEN’, ‘RDEBUG’, ‘REAL0’, ‘SET_BODY’, ‘SET_CLOENV’, ‘SET_FORMALS’, ‘SET_PRSEEN’, ‘SET_RDEBUG’, ‘STRING_PTR’, ‘SYMVALUE’, and ‘VECTOR_PTR’. Any declarations for these in public header files will be removed in the near future, and they will be hidden where possible.
Some non-API entry points have been added to those reported by ‘R CMD check’: ‘COMPLEX0’, ‘ddfind’, ‘DDVAL’, ‘ENSURE_NAMEDMAX’, ‘ENVFLAGS’, ‘FRAME’, ‘HASHTAB’, ‘INTERNAL’, ‘IS_ASCII’, ‘IS_UTF8’, ‘LEVELS’, ‘NAMED’, ‘PRSEEN’, ‘REAL0’, ‘SET_PRSEEN’, and ‘SYMVALUE’. Any declarations for these in public header files will be removed in the near future, and they will be hidden where possible.
New ‘head()’ and ‘tail()’ methods for class ‘"ts"’ time series, proposed by Spencer Graves on R-devel.
New ‘qr.influence()’, a “bare bones” interface to the ‘lm.influence()’ leave-one-out diagnostics computations; wished for in PR#18739.
Some non-API entry points have been added to those reported by ‘R CMD check’: ‘SYMVALUE’, ‘INTERNAL’, ‘DDVAL’, ‘ENSURE_NAMEDMAX’, ‘NAMED’, ‘COMPLEX0’, ‘REAL0’, ‘LEVELS’, ‘FRAME’, ‘HASHTAB’, ‘IS_ASCII’, ‘IS_UTF8’. Any declarations for these in public header files will be removed in the near future, and they will be hidden where possible.
New API functions ‘R_ClosureFormals’, ‘R_ClosureBody’, and ‘R_ClosureEnv’ for extracting closure components. The existing functions ‘R_ClosureExpr’ and ‘R_BytecodeExpr’ have also been added to the API.
New API function ‘R_ParentEnv’.
New functions ‘check_package_urls()’ and ‘check_package_dois()’ in package ‘tools’ for checking URLs and DOIs in package sources.
New API function ‘R_mkClosure’. This checks that its arguments are valid and should be used instead of ‘allocSExp(CLOSXP’ followed by ‘SET_FORMALS’, ‘SET_BODY’, and ‘SET_CLOENV’.
New API functions ‘R_ClosureFormals’, ‘R_ClosureBody’, and ‘R_ClosureEnv’ for extrancting closure components. The existing functions ‘R_ClosureExpr’ and ‘R_BytecodeExpr’ have also been added to the API.
‘graphics’' ‘grid()’ gains optional argument ‘nintLog’.
Auto-generated ‘citation()’ entries no longer include (additional) URLs in the ‘note’ field (PR#18547).
‘R CMD check --as-cran’ notes bad parts in ‘DESCRIPTION’ file URL fields.
The new function ‘Rf_allocLang’ is now available. This provides an
alternative to the idiom of calling ‘Rf_allocList’ followed by
‘SET_TYPEOF’.
The new function ‘Rf_allocLang’ is now available. This provides an alternative to the idiom of calling ‘Rf_allocList’ followed by ‘SET_TYPEOF’.
Functions ‘R_atof’ and ‘R_strtod’ declared in header ‘R_ext/Utils.h’ are now documented in ‘Writing R Extensions’ and so formally part of the API.
The non-API entry points ‘Rf_setSVector’, ‘Rf_StringFalse’, ‘Rf_StringTrue’ and ‘Rf_isBlankString’ have been added to those reported by ‘R CMD check’.
‘R CMD check’ now reports as warnings what ‘gfortran’ calls ‘Fortran 2018 deleted features’, all of which have long been marked as ‘obsolescent’ and some of which were deleted in Fortran 2008 or earlier. Fortran compilers are no longer required to support these.
‘as.numeric()’, ‘scan()’, ‘type.convert()’ and other places which use the internal C function ‘R_strtod’ now require a _non-empty_ digit sequence in a decimal or binary exponent. This aligns with the C/POSIX standard for ‘strtod’ and with ‘?NumericConstants’.
‘as.data.frame(m, make.names=NA)’ now works correctly for a matrix ‘m’ with ‘NA’'s in row names.
The error message from ‘<POSIXlt>[["hour"]]’ and similar now mentions ‘*[[, "hour"]]’, as wished for in PR#17409 and proposed by Michael Chirico.
‘qbinom()’ and potentially ‘qpois()’, ‘qnbinom()’, no longer sometimes fail accurate inversion (of ‘pbinom()’, etc), thanks to Christopher Chang's report and patch in PR#18711.
The internal help server on Windows can again serve requests sent in quick succession, fixing a regression in R 4.4.0.
‘debugcall(<S3Generic>())’ now also works when a corresponding S4-generic version is in the ‘methods’ cache (PR#18143).
Package ‘tools’' ‘toTitleCase(ch0)’ now returns ‘character(0)’ when ‘ch0’ is of zero length; fixing PR#18724, reported by David Hugh Jones.
‘R CMD check’ is no longer broken (without a check result and no explanation in ‘00check.log’) for a package which declares an invalid ‘VignetteBuilder’ in ‘DESCRIPTION’ but has no vignettes.
The new function ‘Rf_allocLang’ is now available. This provides an alternative to the idiom of calling ‘Rf_allocList’ followed by ‘SET_TYPEOF’.
‘SET_TYPEOF’ now signals an error unless the old and new types have compatible memory structure and content. Use of ‘SET_TYPE’ in package C code should be avoided and may be deprecated in the near future. It is better to allocate an object of the proper type in the first place.
The ‘Writing R Extensions’ Texinfo source now contains very experimental annotations for more clearly identifying the API status of C entry points. These annotations are used to produce indices for API, experimental API, and embedded API entry points in the rendered versions. This is very preliminary and may be dropped if a better approach emerges.
‘R CMD check’ is no longer broken (without a check result and no explanation in ‘00check.log’) for a package which declares an invalid ‘VignetteBuilder’ in ‘DESCRIPTION’ but has no vignettes.
The internal code for changing the parent of an environment now signals an error if the new parent is not an environment or if the change would create a cycle in the parent chain.
‘R CMD check’ now reports as warnings what ‘gfortran’ calls ‘Fortran 2018 deleted features’, all of which have long been marked as ‘obsolescent’ and some of which were deleted in Fortran 2008 or earlier. Fortran compilers are no longer required to support these.
Package ‘tools’' ‘toTitleCase(ch0)’ now returns ‘character(0)’ when ‘ch0’ is of zero length; fixing PR#18724, reported by David Hugh Jones.
‘debugcall(<S3Generic>())’ now also works when a corresponding S4-generic version is in the ‘methods’ cache (PR#18143).
Deprecated (for more than 9 years!) functions ‘linearizeMlist’, ‘listFromMlist’, and ‘showMlist’ and the ‘"MethodsList"’ class for S4 method handling were removed from package ‘methods’. Deprecated functions ‘balanceMethodsList’, ‘emptyMethodsList’, ‘inheritedSubMethodLists’, ‘insertMethod’, ‘insertMethodInEmptyList’, ‘makeMethodsList’, ‘mergeMethods’, ‘MethodsList’, ‘MethodsListSelect’, and ‘SignatureMethod’ were made defunct, as were the ‘"MethodsList"’ branches of functions ‘assignMethodsMetaData’, ‘finalDefaultMethod’, and ‘MethodAddCoerce’.
The internal help server on Windows can again serve requests sent in quick succession, fixing a regression in R 4.4.0.
Several deprecated auxiliary functions and the ‘MethodsList’ class for S4 method handling are now defunct in package ‘methods’, or have even been removed.
‘qbinom()’ and potentially ‘qpois()’, ‘qnbinom()’, no longer sometimes fail accurate inversion (of ‘pbinom()’, etc), thanks to Christopher Chang's report and patch in PR#18711.
The error message from ‘<POSIXlt>[["hour"]]’ and similar now mentions ‘*[[, "hour"]]’, as wished for in PR#17409 and proposed by Michael Chirico.
The numeric version creators now stop on invalid non-character version specifications.
‘as.data.frame(m, make.names=NA)’ now works correctly for a matrix ‘m’ with ‘NA’'s in row names.
The non-API and hidden entry points ‘Rf_setIVector’, ‘Rf_setRVector’ and ‘Rf_setSVector’ have been removed.
The non-API entry points ‘Rf_setSVector’, ‘Rf_StringFalse’, ‘Rf_StringTrue’ and ‘Rf_isBlankString’ have been added to those reported by ‘R CMD check’.
Functions ‘R_atof’ and ‘R_strtod’ declared in header ‘R_ext/Utils.h’ are now documented in ‘Writing R Extensions’ and so formally part of the API.
‘as.numeric()’, ‘scan()’, ‘type.convert()’ and other places which use the internal C function ‘R_strtod’ now require a _non-empty_ digit sequence in a decimal or binary exponent. This aligns with the C/POSIX standard for ‘strtod’ and with ‘?NumericConstants’.
‘as.numeric()’, ‘scan()’, ‘type.convert()’ and other places which use the internal C function ‘R_strtod’ now require a _non-empty_ digit sequence in a decimal or binary exponent. This aligns with the C standard for ‘strtod’ and with ‘?NumericConstants’.
[None yet.]
‘as.integer(rl)’ and hence ‘as.raw(rl)’ now work for a ‘list’ of ‘raw(1)’ elements, as proposed by Michael Chirico's PR#18696.
The licence headers for the RPC code in ‘src/extra/xdr’ have been updated to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle America in 2010.
New startup option ‘--max-connections’ to set the maximum number of simultaneous connections for the session. Defaults to 128 as before: allowed values up to 4096 (but resource limits may in practice restrict to smaller values).
‘kappa(., exact = TRUE, norm = *)’ now works for all norms and also for complex matrices. In symmetric / triangular cases, the new argument ‘uplo = "U" | "L"’ allows the upper or lower triangular part to be specified.
Functions ‘psmirnov()’, ‘qsmirnov()’ and ‘rsmirnov()’ in package ‘stats’ have had argument ‘two.sided’ renamed to ‘alternative’, to take into account that the permutation distributions of the one-sided statistics can be different in the case of ties. Consequence of PR#18582.
The icence headers for the RPC code in ‘src/extra/xdr’ have been updated to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle America in 2010.
The default method for the directional comparison operators ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘<=’, and ‘>=’ now signals an error when one of the operands is a language object, i.e. a symbol or a call.
‘as.data.frame()’'s default method now also works fine with atomic objects inheriting from classes such as ‘"roman"’, ‘"octmode"’ and ‘"hexmode"’, thus fulfilling the wish of PR#18421, by Benjamin Feakins.
‘R CMD check --as-cran’ will compile C++ code with ‘-DR_NO_REMAP’.
‘tools::testInstalledPackage()’ is no longer silent about failures from running examples or tests and its return code no longer ignores failures from checking vignettes.
‘xtabs(Freq ~ .)’ now consistently defaults to ‘na.action = na.pass’, using ‘na.rm = FALSE’ (added as an argument) when summing over ‘Freq’ (PR#17770).
Rd comment lines no longer cause broken paragraphs in the rendered PDF and plain-text help. In code blocks, pure comment lines (starting with ‘%’) no longer produce an empty line.
New completion option ‘backtick’ (disabled by default) allows non-syntactic completions to be wrapped in backquotes. This is currently only useful for Jupyter notebooks via the ‘IRkernel’ package, and may cause problems for other backends.
New function ‘pkg2HTML()’ in ‘tools’ to create single-page HTML reference manuals for R packages.
Licence headers for the RPC code in ‘src/extra/xdr’ have been updated to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle America in 2010.
The parser has been updated to work with ‘bison’ 3.8.2, which is now used for the pre-generated parsers in ‘gram.c’, ‘file.c’, and ‘gramRd.c’. A few parser error messages have changed, which may affect code that relies on exact messages.
Rtools44 has experimental support for 64-bit ARM (‘aarch64’) CPUs _via_ the LLVM 17 toolchain using ‘lld’, ‘clang’/‘flang-new’ and ‘libc++’.
The makefiles and installer scripts for Windows have been tailored to Rtools44, an update of the Rtools43 toolchain. It is based on GCC 13 and newer versions of MinGW-W64, binutils and libraries (targeting 64-bit Intel CPUs). R-devel can no longer be built using Rtools43 without changes.
The legacy graphics devices ‘pictex()’ and ‘xfig()’ are now deprecated. They do not support recent graphics enhancements and their font handling is rudimentary. The intention is to retain them for historical interest as long as they remain somewhat functional.
If the ‘libdeflate’ library and headers are available, ‘libdeflate’ rather than ‘libz’ is used to (de)compress R objects in lazy-load databases. Typically tasks spend up to 5% of their time on such operations, although creating lazy-data databases is one of the exceptions.
This can be suppressed if the library is available by the ‘configure’ option ‘--without-libdeflate-compression’.
‘mkCharLenCE’ was incorrectly documented to take a ‘size_t’ length but was implemented with ‘int’ (and character strings in R are limited to 2^31 - 1 bytes).
‘R CMD check --as-cran’ now runs \donttest examples (which are run by ‘example()’) instead of instructing the tester to do so. This can be temporarily circumvented during development by setting environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_DONTTEST_EXAMPLES_’ to a false value.
The byte code evaluator now uses less C stack space for recursive calls to byte-compiled functions. It also makes more of an effort to avoid allocations for scalar return values.
Startup banners, ‘R --version’, ‘sessionInfo()’ and ‘R CMD check’ no longer report ‘(64-bit)’ as part of the platform as this is almost universal - the increasingly rare 32-bit platforms will still report ‘(32-bit)’.
On Windows, ditto for window titles.
‘is.atomic(NULL)’ now returns ‘FALSE’, as ‘NULL’ is not an atomic vector. Strict back-compatibility would replace ‘is.atomic(foo)’ by ‘(is.null(foo) || is.atomic(foo))’ but should happen only sparingly.
The ‘confint()’ methods for ‘"glm"’ and ‘"nls"’ objects have been copied to the ‘stats’ package. Previously, they were stubs which called versions in package ‘MASS’. The ‘MASS’ namespace is no longer loaded if you invoke (say) ‘confint(glmfit)’. Further, the ‘"glm"’ method for ‘profile()’ and the ‘plot()’ and ‘pairs()’ methods for class ‘"profile"’ have been copied from ‘MASS’ to ‘stats’. (‘profile.nls()’ and ‘plot.profile.nls()’ were already in ‘stats’.)
The ‘confint()’ and ‘profile’ methods for ‘"glm"’ objects have gained a possibility to do profiling based on the \IRao Score statistic in addition to the default Likelihood Ratio. This is controlled by a new ‘test =’ argument.
The ‘pairs()’ method for ‘"profile"’ objects has been extended with a ‘which =’ argument to allow plotting only a subset of the parameters.
The ‘"glm"’ method for ‘anova()’ computes test statistics and p-values by default, using a chi-squared test or an F test depending on whether the dispersion is fixed or free. Test statistics can be suppressed by giving argument ‘test’ a false logical value.
In ‘setRepositories()’ the repositories can be set using their names via ‘name =’ instead of index ‘ind =’.
‘methods()’ and ‘.S3methods()’ gain a ‘all.names’ option for the (rare) case where functions starting with a ‘.’ should be included.
Serializations can now be interrupted (e.g., by ‘Ctrl-C’ on a Unix-alike) if they take too long, e.g., from ‘save.image()’, thanks to suggestions by \IIvan Krylov and others on R-devel.
New startup option ‘--max-connections’ to set the maximum number of connections for the session. Defaults to 128 as before: allowed values up to 4096 (but resource limits may in practice restrict to smaller values).
R on Windows (since Windows 10 2004) now uses the new Segment Heap allocator. This may improve performance of some memory-intensive applications.
When R packages are built, typically by ‘R CMD build <pkg>’, the new ‘--user=<build_user>’ option overrides the (internally determined) user name, currently ‘Sys.info()["user"]’ or ‘LOGNAME’. This is a (modified) fulfillment of Will Landau's suggestion in PR#17530.
‘tools::testInstalledBasic()’ gets new optional arguments ‘outDir’ and ‘testSrcdir’, e.g., allowing to use it in a ‘<builddir> != <srcdir>’ setup, and in standard “binary” Windows installation *if* a source ‘tests/’ folder is present.
‘range(<DT_with_Inf>, finite = TRUE)’ now work for objects of class ‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’ with infinite entries, analogously to ‘range.default()’, as proposed by Davis Vaughan on R-devel. Other ‘range()’-methods can make use of new function ‘.rangeNum()’.
New ‘.internalGenerics’ object complementing ‘.S3PrimitiveGenerics’, for documentation and low-level book-keeping.
‘grid()’ now invisibly returns the x- and y- coordinates at which the grid-lines were drawn.
‘norm(., type)’ now also works for complex matrices.
‘kappa(., exact = TRUE, norm = *)’ now works for all norms and also for complex matrices. In symmetric / triangular cases, new argument ‘uplo = "U" | "L"’ allows to specify the upper or lower triangular part.
‘memDecompress(type = "unknown")’ recognizes compression in the default ‘\Izlib’ format as used by ‘memCompress(type = "gzip")’.
‘memCompress()’ and ‘memDecompress()’ will use the ‘libdeflate’ library (<https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate>) if installed. This uses the same type of compression for ‘type = "gzip"’ but is 1.5-2x faster than the system ‘libz’ library on some common platforms: the speed-up may depend on the library version.
‘diff()’ for objects of class ‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’ accepts a ‘units’ argument passed via ‘...’.
Dynamic help now does a much better job of rendering package ‘DESCRIPTION’ metadata.
‘Rprof()’ gains an ‘event’ argument and support for elapsed (real) time profiling on Unix (PR#18076).
‘filled.contour()’ gains a ‘key.border’ argument.
‘tools::update_pkg_po()’ gets arguments ‘pot_make’ and ‘mo_make’ for _not_ re-making the corresponding files, and additionally a ‘verbose’ argument.
Hexadecimal string colour specifications are now accepted in short form, so, for example, we can use ‘"#123"’, which is equivalent to ‘"#112233"’.
Thanks to \IMikeFC for the original idea and \IElla Kaye, \IMalcolm Barrett, \IGeorge Stagg, and \IHanne Oberman for the patch.
Plain-text help shows \var markup by angle brackets.
The new experimental primitive function ‘declare()’ is intended to eventually allow information about R code to be communicated to the interpreter, compiler, and code analysis tools. The syntax for declarations is still being developed.
Functions ‘psmirnov()’, ‘qsmirnov()’ and ‘rsmirnov()’ in package ‘stats’ have argument ‘two.sided’ renamed to ‘alternative’, to take into account that the permutation distributions of the one-sided statistics can be different in the case of ties. Consequence of PR#18582.
‘sort()’ is now an implicit S4 generic in ‘methods’.
Formatting and printing, ‘format(z), print(z)’, of complex vectors ‘z’ no longer zap relatively small real or imaginary parts to zero, fixing PR#16752. This is an API change, as it was documented previously to round real and imaginary parts together on purpose, producing nicer looking output. As mentioned, e.g. in the PR, this change is compatible with many other “R-like” programming environments.
We have simplified the internal code and now basically format the real and imaginary parts independently of each other.
New experimental functions ‘Tailcall()’ and ‘Exec()’ to support writing stack-space-efficient recursive functions.
Where characters are attempted to be plotted by ‘pdf()’, ‘postscript()’ and ‘xfig()’ which are not in the selected 8-bit character set (most often Latin-1) and the R session is using a UTF-8 locale, the warning messages will show the UTF-8 character rather than its bytes and one dot will be substituted per character rather than per byte. (Platforms whose ‘iconv()’ does transliteration silently plot the transliteration.)
In a UTF-8 locale some transliterations are now done with a warning (e.g., dashes and Unicode minus to hyphen, ligatures are expanded, \Ipermille (‘‰’) is replaced by ‘o/oo’), although the OS may have got there first. These are warnings as they will continue to be replaced by dots in earlier versions of R.
The matrix multiplication functions ‘crossprod()’ and ‘tcrossprod()’ are now also primitive and S3 generic, as ‘%*%’ had become in R 4.3.0.
‘source()’ and ‘example()’ have a new optional argument ‘catch.aborts’ which allows continued evaluation of the R code after an error.
The non-Quartz ‘tiff()’ devices allow additional types of compression if supported by the platform's ‘libtiff’ library.
The list of base and recommended package names is now provided by ‘tools::standard_package_names()’.
‘cairo_pdf()’ and ‘cairo_ps()’ default to ‘onefile = TRUE’ to closer match ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’.
New option ‘catch.script.errors’ provides a documented way to catch errors and then continue in non-interactive use.
‘L %||% R’ newly in ‘base’ is an expressive idiom for the phrases ‘if(!is.null(L)) L else R’ or ‘if(is.null(L)) R else L’.
The return value from ‘warnings()’ now always inherits from ‘"warnings"’ as documented, now also in the case of no warnings where it previously returned ‘NULL’.
‘as.complex("1i")’ now returns ‘0 + 1i’ instead of ‘NA’ with a warning.
‘z <- c(NA, 1i)’ now keeps the imaginary part ‘Im(z[1]) == 0’, no longer coercing to ‘NA_complex_’. Similarly, ‘cumsum(z)’ correctly sums real and imaginary parts separately, i.e., without “crosstalk” in case of ‘NA’s.
On Alpine Linux ‘iconv()’ now maps ‘"latin2"’, ‘"latin-2"’, ‘"latin9"’ and ‘"latin-9"’ to encoding names the OS knows about (case-insensitively).
‘iconv(sub = "Unicode")’ now always zero-pads to four (hex) digits, rather than to 4 or 8. (This seems to have become the convention once Unicode restricted the number of Unicode points to 2^21 - 1 and so will never need more than 6 digits.)
‘NCOL(NULL)’ now returns 0 instead of 1, for consistency with ‘cbind()’.
The information for the Euro glyph missing from the Adobe ‘.afm’ files for the Courier, Helvetica and Times families has been copied from their URW equivalents - this will improve vertical centring in the ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ devices.
The included BLAS sources have been updated to those shipped with LAPACK version 3.12.0. The changes are almost entirely cosmetic.
The included LAPACK sources have been updated to version 3.12.0 and some further double-complex routines added.
There are new font families for the 2014-5 URW 2.0 fonts (see ‘?pdf’) which are included in recent versions of Ghostscript. These have font widths for most Greek glyphs and a few others which were missing from the original versions (whose font families remain available for reproducibility, although Ghostscript-based viewers will render using the 2.0 versions).
Improve the large-n efficiency of ‘as.matrix(<dist>)’, thanks an R contributors effort, notably by Tim Taylor and Heather Turner, see PR#18660.
The default and ‘numeric’ methods of ‘all.equal()’ get a ‘check.class’ option.
‘zapsmall()’ gets new optional arguments, function ‘mFUN’ and ‘min.d’, for extra flexibility; fulfills a wish in PR#18199. Also, it is now an implicit S4 generic in package ‘methods’.
The Rd filter for ‘aspell()’ gains an ‘ignore’ argument.
New generic function ‘sort_by()’, primarily useful for the ‘data.frame’ method which can be used to sort rows of a data frame by one or more columns.
Licence headers for the RPC code in ‘src/extra/xdr’ have been updated to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle America in 2010.
New function ‘pkg2HTML()’ in ‘tools’ to create single-page HTML reference manuals for R packages.
The parser has been updated to work with \Ibison 3.8.2, which is now used for the pre-generated parsers in ‘gram.c’, ‘file.c’, and ‘gramRd.c’. A few parser error messages have changed, which may affect code that relies on exact messages.
System \Ivalgrind headers are now required to use ‘configure’ option ‘--with-valgrind-instrumentation’ with value ‘1’ or ‘2’.
‘configure’ will warn if it encounters a 32-bit build, as that is nowadays almost untested.
Environment variable ‘R_SYSTEM_ABI’ is no longer used and so no longer recorded in ‘etc/Renviron’ (it was not on Windows and was only ever used when preparing package ‘tools’).
If the ‘libdeflate’ library and headers are available, ‘libdeflate’ rather than ‘libz’ is used to (de)compress R objects in lazy-load databases, Typically tasks spend up to 5% of their time on such operations, although creating lazy-data databases is one of the exceptions.
This can be suppressed if the library is available by the ‘configure’ option ‘--without-libdeflate-compression’.
‘configure’ option ‘--enable-lto=check’ has not worked reliably since 2019 and has been removed.
The minimum ‘autoconf’ requirement for a maintainer build has been increased to ‘autoconf’ 2.71.
It is intended to increase this to 2.72 for R 4.5.0: the distributed ‘configure’ file was generated using 2.72.
The minimum version requirement for an external LAPACK has been reduced to 3.9.0.
No default C++ compiler is set if no C++17 compiler is detected: there is no longer an automatic fallback to C++14 or C++11.
Compilers from the last five years should have sufficient support: for others macros ‘CXX’ and ‘CXXSTD’ can be set in file ‘config.site’ to provide a fallback if needed.
The ObjectiveC++ compiler now by default uses the standard selected by R for C++ (currently C++17) rather than the default standard for the C++ compiler (which on macOS is still C++98).
A new ‘configure’ option ‘--with-newAccelerate’ makes use of Apple's ‘new’ BLAS / LAPACK interfaces in their Accelerate framework. Those interfaces are only available in macOS 13.3 or later, and building requires SDK 13.3 or later (from the Command Line Tools or \IXcode 14.3 or later).
By default the option uses new Accelerate for BLAS calls: to also use it for LAPACK use option ‘--with-newAccelerate=lapack’. The later interfaces provide LAPACK 3.9.1 rather than 3.2.1: 3.9.1 is from 2021-04 and does not include the improved algorithms introduced in LAPACK 3.10.0 (including for BLAS calls).
The makefiles and installer scripts for Windows have been tailored to \IRtools44, an update of the \IRtools43 toolchain. It is based on GCC 13 and newer versions of \IMinGW-W64, \Ibinutils and libraries (targeting 64-bit Intel CPUs). R-devel can no longer be built using \IRtools43 without changes.
\IRtools44 has experimental support for 64-bit ARM (\Iaarch64) CPUs via \ILLVM 17 toolchain using ‘lld’, ‘clang’/‘flang-new’ and \Ilibc++.
‘R CMD check’ notes when S4-style exports are used without declaring a strong dependence on package ‘methods’.
‘tools::checkRd()’ (used by ‘R CMD check’) detects more problems with \Sexpr-based dynamic content, including bad nesting of \Sexprs and invalid arguments.
‘tools::checkRd()’ now reports Rd titles and section names ending in a period; this is ignored by ‘R CMD check’ unless environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_RD_CHECKRD_MINLEVEL_’ is set to -5 or smaller.
‘R CMD check’ now notes Rd files without an \alias, as long documented in ‘Writing R Extensions’ §1.3.1. The check for a missing \description has been moved from ‘tools::checkRd()’ to ‘tools::checkRdContents()’.
‘R CMD check’ now visits ‘inst/NEWS.Rd’ and OS-specific ‘man’ subdirectories when checking Rd files.
‘tools::checkDocFiles()’ and ‘tools::checkRdContents()’ now also check internal Rd files by default, but “specially” (ignoring missing documentation of arguments).
‘R CMD Rdiff’ gets option ‘--useEx’.
‘R CMD check’ now warns on non-portable uses of Fortran ‘KIND’ such as ‘INTEGER(KIND=4)’ and ‘REAL(KIND=8)’.
To see the failing lines set environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_FORTRAN_KIND_DETAILS_’ to a true value.
When checking Rd files, ‘R CMD check’ now notes some of the “lost braces” that ‘tools::checkRd()’ finds. Typical problems are Rd macros missing the initial backslash (e.g., ‘code{...}’), in-text set notation (e.g., ‘{1, 2}’, where the braces need escaping), and \itemize lists with \describe-style entries of the form \item{label}{description}.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ (and hence ‘check’) will compile C++ code with ‘-DR_NO_REMAP’ if environment variable ‘_R_CXX_USE_NO_REMAP_’ is set to a true value. It is planned that this will in future become the default for compiling C++.
The new built-in Rd macro \dontdiff{} can be used to mark example code whose output should be ignored when comparing check output to reference output (‘tests/Examples/<pkg>-Ex.Rout.save’). The \dontdiff tag, like \donttest, is _not_ shown on the rendered help page, so provides a clean alternative to ‘## IGNORE_RDIFF_(BEGIN|END)’ comments.
‘R CMD build’ when there is no ‘NAMESPACE’, now uses the recommended ‘exportPattern("^[^.]")’, instead of exporting everything.
‘R CMD check’ now warns about non-ASCII characters in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file (in addition to R files). Such packages are not portable and may fail to install on some platforms.
Headers ‘R_ext/Applic.h’ and ‘R-ext/Linpack.h’ used to include ‘R_ext/BLAS.h’ although this was undocumented and unneeded by their documented entry points. They no longer do so.
New function ‘R_missing()’, factored out from ‘do_missing()’, used to fix PR#18579.
‘SEXP’ type ‘S4SXP’ has been renamed to ‘OBJSXP’ to support experimenting with alternative object systems. The ‘S4SXP’ value can still be used in ‘C’ code but is now deprecated. Based on contributions from the R Consortium's Object-Oriented Programming Working Group.
New function ‘pow1p(x,y)’ for accurate ‘(1+x)^y’.
‘data()’ no longer handles zipped data from long-defunct (since R 2.13.0) ‘--use-zip-data’ installations.
The legacy graphics devices ‘pictex()’ and ‘xfig()’ are now deprecated. They do not support recent graphics enhancements and their font-handling is rudimentary. The intention is to retain them for historical interest as long as they remain somewhat functional.
Support for ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ has been removed from the ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ devices - this was a legacy encoding supporting classic macOS up to 2001 and no longer has universal ‘libiconv’ support.
‘is.R()’ is deprecated as no other S dialect is known to be in use (and this could only identify historical dialects, not future ones).
Further information on calls can be obtained by setting the environment variable ‘_R_DEPRECATED_IS_R_’ to ‘error’ which turns the deprecation warning into an error and so by default gives a traceback. (This is done by ‘R CMD check --as-cran’.)
‘UseMethod()’ no longer forwards local variables assigned in the generic function into method call environments before evaluating the method body. This makes method calls behave more like standard function calls and makes method code easier to analyze correctly.
The twelve ‘as.data.frame.<class>()’ methods which were deprecated only via ‘_R_CHECK_AS_DATA_FRAME_EXPLICIT_METHOD_’ and in ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ are formally deprecated now in favour of calling ‘as.data.frame()’ or ‘as.data.frame.vector()’. The deprecation “check” now works also when ‘as.data.frame()’ is S4 generic thanks to \IIvan Krylov.
The default method for the directional comparison operators ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘<=’, and ‘>=’ now signals an error when one of the operands is a language objects, i.e. a symbol or a call.
For ‘terms.formula()’, deprecate ‘abb’ and ‘neg.out’ arguments _formally_ in addition to just documenting it.
The ‘methods’ package is more robust to not being attached to the search path. More work needs to be done.
‘pairwise.t.test()’ misbehaved when subgroups had 0 DF for variance, even with ‘pool.sd = TRUE’. (PR#18594 by Jack Berry).
Probability distribution functions ‘[dpq]<distrib>(x, *)’, but also ‘bessel[IKJY](x, .)’ now consistently preserve ‘attributes(x)’ when ‘length(x) == 0’, e.g., for a 2 x 0 matrix, thanks to \IKarolis Koncevičius' report PR#18509.
Group “Summary” computations such as ‘sum(1:3, 4, na.rm = 5, NA, 7, na.rm = LL)’ now give an error instead of either ‘17’ or ‘NN’ for ‘LL’ true or false, as proposed by \IIvan Krylov on the R-devel mailing list. (This also means it is now an error to specify ‘na.rm’ more than once.)
‘as.complex(x)’ now returns ‘complex(real = x, imaginary = 0)’ for _all_ numerical and logical ‘x’, notably also for ‘NA’ or ‘NA_integer_’.
Directories are now omitted by ‘file.copy(, recursive = FALSE)’ and in ‘file.append()’ (PR#17337).
‘gsub()’ and ‘sub()’ are now more robust to integer overflow when reporting errors caused by too large input strings (PR#18346).
Top-level handlers are now more robust to attempts to remove a handler whilst handlers are running (PR#18508).
The handling of ‘Alt+F4’ in \Idialogs created on Windows using \IGraphApp has been fixed (PR#13870).
‘density()’ more consistently computes grid values for the FFT-based convolution, following \IRobert Schlicht's analysis and proposal in PR#18337, correcting density values typically by a factor of about 0.999. Argument ‘old.coords = TRUE’ provides back compatibility.
‘palette.colors()’ gains a ‘name’ argument that defaults to ‘FALSE’ controlling whether the vector of colours that is returned has names (where possible). PR#18529.
‘tools::xgettext()’ no longer extracts the (non-translatable) class names from ‘warningCondition’ and ‘errorCondition’ calls.
‘S3method(<gen>, <class>, <func>)’ in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file now works (again) when ‘<func>’ is visible from the namespace, e.g., imported, or in base.
‘getParseData(f)’ now also works for a function defined in the first of several ‘<pkg>/R/*.R’ source files, thanks to \IKirill Müller's report and Duncan Murdoch's patch in PR#16756.
Rd \Sexpr macros with nested #ifdef conditionals were not processed.
A non-blocking connection with non-default encoding (such as a socket) now correctly returns from ‘readLines()’ after new data has arrived also when its EOF had been reached previously. Thanks to \IPeter Meilstrup's report on R-devel and \IIvan Krylov's report and patch proposal in PR#18555.
‘tools::checkRdContents()’ failed to detect empty argument descriptions when they spanned multiple lines, including those generated by ‘prompt()’. These cases are now noted by ‘R CMD check’.
Plain-text help no longer outputs spurious colons in the arguments list (for multi-line \item labels in the Rd source).
‘kappa()’ and ‘rcond()’ work correctly in more cases; ‘kappa(., norm = "2")’ now warns that it computes the 1-norm with (default) ‘exact = FALSE’; prompted by \IMikael Jagan's quite comprehensive PR#18543.
Rd skeletons generated by ‘prompt()’ or ‘promptData()’ now use a dummy title (so ‘R CMD build’ works). ‘tools::checkRdContents()’ has been updated to detect such template leftovers, including from ‘promptPackage()’.
When S4 method dispatch fails because no method was found, the error message now includes the signature argument names; thanks to Michael Chirico's proposal on the R-devel list.
‘withAutoprint({ .. })’ now preserves ‘srcref’s previously lost, thanks to Andrew Simmons' report plus fix in PR#18572.
‘transform.data.frame()’ no longer adjusts names; in particular, untransformed variables are kept as-is, including those with syntactically invalid names (PR#17890).
The ‘keep.source’ option for Rd \Sexpr blocks is no longer ignored.
The ‘formula’ methods for ‘t.test()’ and ‘wilcox.test()’ now catch when ‘paired’ is passed, addressing PR#14359; use ‘Pair(x1, x2) ~ 1’ for a paired test.
The level reported in the ‘browser’ prompt was often too large. It now shows the number of browser contexts on the stack.
For ‘cbind()’ and ‘rbind()’, the optional ‘deparse.level’ argument is now properly passed to methods, thanks to \IMikael Jagan's PR#18579 and comments there.
Some error and warning messages for large (‘long vector’) ‘matrix(v, nr, nc)’ and ‘dim(m) <- d’ are now correct about sizes, using ‘long long’ formatting, fixing PR#18612 (and more) reported by \IMikael Jagan.
‘readChar(useBytes = TRUE)’ now terminates strings even when the underlying connection uses extra spaces in the input buffer. This fixes problems with extra garbage seen with ‘gzip’ connections, PR#18605.
Named capture in PCRE regular expressions now works also with more than 127 named groups (PR#18588).
Datetime functions are now robust against long jumps when dealing with internal time zone changes. This avoids confusing warnings about an invalid time zone, previously triggered by turning warnings into errors or handling them via ‘tryCatch’ (PR#17966, PR#17780).
Datetime functions now restore even an empty ‘TZ’ environment variable after internal time zone changes (PR#17724). This makes results of datetime functions with this (typically unintentional) setting more predictable.
‘drop.terms(*)’ now drops response as by default, ‘keep.response = FALSE’, fixing PR#18564 thanks to \IMikael Jagan.
‘dummy.coef(.)’ now also works for ‘lm()’-models with ‘character’ categorical predictor variables rather than ‘factor’ ones, fixing PR#18635 reported by \IJinsong Zhao.
‘formals(f) <- formals(f)’ now also works for a function w/o arguments and atomic _constant_ ‘body(f)’.
Correct ‘as.function(<invalid list>, .)’'s error message.
‘removeSource()’ is yet more thorough in finding and removing ‘"srcref"’ and the other source references from parsed R language chunks, fixing PR#18638 thanks to Andrew Simmons.
‘dgeom()’ is more accurate now, notably when its result is very small, fixing PR#18642 thanks to the proposal of \IMorten Welinder, also improving other instances where C level ‘binom_raw(x, n, ..)’ has ‘x == 0’ or ‘x== n’.
‘warning()’ with ‘options(warn = 1)’ has improved output for multi-line messages.
‘axis.Date()’ and ‘axis.POSIXct()’ now respect the ‘par("lab")’ setting for the number of ‘pretty()’ intervals.
Comparisons for language objects (which are based on deparsing) are now more careful about using accurate deparsed results (PR#18676).
Plain-text help (‘Rd2txt’) now correctly preserves blank lines following single-line \dontrun code.
‘<POSIXlt>[*]’ no longer sets wrong ‘"balanced"’ attribute, fixing PR#18681 thanks to \IMikael Jagan.
‘str(<classed-call>)’ now deparses the call as expected, fixing PR#18684, reported by \IDave Slager.
In Rd examples, code following the closing brace of a \dontrun, \dontshow or \donttest tag on the same line is no longer skipped when ‘R CMD check’ runs the examples.
‘as.data.frame(matrix(*, ncol=0))’ now gets valid ‘names()’ and ‘colnames()’; reported by \IDavis Vaughan on the R-devel list.
Internal Mathlib function ‘stirlerr(n)’ is now almost fully (52-bit) accurate for all n >= ~5.9 and more accurate also in the range 1 -- 5.9. This entails small (“after 12th decimal”) changes in density functions, e.g., ‘dgamma()’ in _some_ regions of their support. The fix was partly prompted by \IMorten Welinder's PR#18640.
Numbers like ‘9876543.2’ are now considered non-integer by Mathlib internal ‘R_nonint()’, amending original fix of PR#15734.
The makefiles and installer scripts for Windows have been tailored to
\IRtools44, an update of the \IRtools43 toolchain. It is based on GCC
13 and newer versions of \IMinGW-W64, \Ibinutils and libraries
(targeting 64-bit Intel CPUs). R-devel can no longer be built using
\IRtools43 without changes.
\IRtools44 has experimental support for 64-bit ARM (\Iaarch64) CPUs via \ILLVM 17 toolchain using ‘lld’, ‘clang’/‘flang-new’ and \Ilibc++.
‘R CMD check’ notes when S4-style exports are used without declaring a
strong dependence on package ‘methods’.
‘tools::checkRd()’ (used by ‘R CMD check’) detects more problems with
\Sexpr-based dynamic content, including bad nesting of \Sexprs and
invalid arguments.
‘tools::checkRd()’ now reports Rd titles and section names ending in a
period; this is ignored by ‘R CMD check’ unless environment variable
‘_R_CHECK_RD_CHECKRD_MINLEVEL_’ is set to -5 or smaller.
‘R CMD check’ now notes Rd files without an \alias, as long documented
in ‘Writing R Extensions’ §1.3.1. The check for a missing \description
has been moved from ‘tools::checkRd()’ to ‘tools::checkRdContents()’.
‘R CMD check’ now visits ‘inst/NEWS.Rd’ and OS-specific ‘man’
subdirectories when checking Rd files.
‘tools::checkDocFiles()’ and ‘tools::checkRdContents()’ now also check
internal Rd files by default, but “specially” (ignoring missing
documentation of arguments).
‘R CMD Rdiff’ gets option ‘--useEx’.
‘R CMD check’ now warns on non-portable uses of Fortran ‘KIND’ such as
‘INTEGER(KIND=4)’ and ‘REAL(KIND=8)’.
To see the failing lines set environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_FORTRAN_KIND_DETAILS_’ to a true value.
When checking Rd files, ‘R CMD check’ now notes some of the “lost
braces” that ‘tools::checkRd()’ finds. Typical problems are Rd macros
missing the initial backslash (e.g., ‘code{...}’), in-text set notation
(e.g., ‘{1, 2}’, where the braces need escaping), and \itemize lists
with \describe-style entries of the form \item{label}{description}.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ (and hence ‘check’) will compile C++ code with
‘-DR_NO_REMAP’ if environment variable ‘_R_CXX_USE_NO_REMAP_’ is set to
a true value. It is planned that this will in future become the
default for compiling C++.
The new built-in Rd macro \dontdiff{} can be used to mark example code
whose output should be ignored when comparing check output to reference
output (‘tests/Examples/<pkg>-Ex.Rout.save’). The \dontdiff tag, like
\donttest, is _not_ shown on the rendered help page, so provides a
clean alternative to ‘## IGNORE_RDIFF_(BEGIN|END)’ comments.
‘R CMD build’ when there is no ‘NAMESPACE’, now uses the recommended
‘exportPattern("^[^.]")’, instead of exporting everything.
‘R CMD check’ now warns about non-ASCII characters in the ‘NAMESPACE’
file (in addition to R files). Such packages are not portable and may
fail to install on some platforms.
The ‘methods’ package is more robust to not being attached to the
search path. More work needs to be done.
‘pairwise.t.test()’ misbehaved when subgroups had 0 DF for variance,
even with ‘pool.sd = TRUE’. (PR#18594 by Jack Berry).
Probability distribution functions ‘[dpq]<distrib>(x, *)’, but also
‘bessel[IKJY](x, .)’ now consistently preserve ‘attributes(x)’ when
‘length(x) == 0’, e.g., for a 2 x 0 matrix, thanks to \IKarolis
Koncevičius' report PR#18509.
Group “Summary” computations such as ‘sum(1:3, 4, na.rm = 5, NA, 7,
na.rm = LL)’ now give an error instead of either ‘17’ or ‘NN’ for ‘LL’
true or false, as proposed by \IIvan Krylov on the R-devel mailing
list. (This also means it is now an error to specify ‘na.rm’ more than
once.)
‘as.complex(x)’ now returns ‘complex(real = x, imaginary = 0)’ for
_all_ numerical and logical ‘x’, notably also for ‘NA’ or
‘NA_integer_’.
Directories are now omitted by ‘file.copy(, recursive = FALSE)’ and in
‘file.append()’ (PR#17337).
‘gsub()’ and ‘sub()’ are now more robust to integer overflow when
reporting errors caused by too large input strings (PR#18346).
Top-level handlers are now more robust to attempts to remove a handler
whilst handlers are running (PR#18508).
The handling of ‘Alt+F4’ in \Idialogs created on Windows using
\IGraphApp has been fixed (PR#13870).
‘density()’ more consistently computes grid values for the FFT-based
convolution, following \IRobert Schlicht's analysis and proposal in
PR#18337, correcting density values typically by a factor of about
0.999. Argument ‘old.coords = TRUE’ provides back compatibility.
‘palette.colors()’ gains a ‘name’ argument that defaults to ‘FALSE’
controlling whether the vector of colours that is returned has names
(where possible). PR#18529.
‘tools::xgettext()’ no longer extracts the (non-translatable) class
names from ‘warningCondition’ and ‘errorCondition’ calls.
‘S3method(<gen>, <class>, <func>)’ in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file now works
(again) when ‘<func>’ is visible from the namespace, e.g., imported, or
in base.
‘getParseData(f)’ now also works for a function defined in the first of
several ‘<pkg>/R/*.R’ source files, thanks to \IKirill Müller's report
and Duncan Murdoch's patch in PR#16756.
Rd \Sexpr macros with nested #ifdef conditionals were not processed.
A non-blocking connection with non-default encoding (such as a socket)
now correctly returns from ‘readLines()’ after new data has arrived
also when its EOF had been reached previously. Thanks to \IPeter
Meilstrup's report on R-devel and \IIvan Krylov's report and patch
proposal in PR#18555.
‘tools::checkRdContents()’ failed to detect empty argument descriptions
when they spanned multiple lines, including those generated by
‘prompt()’. These cases are now noted by ‘R CMD check’.
Plain-text help no longer outputs spurious colons in the arguments list
(for multi-line \item labels in the Rd source).
‘kappa()’ and ‘rcond()’ work correctly in more cases; ‘kappa(., norm =
"2")’ now warns that it computes the 1-norm with (default) ‘exact =
FALSE’; prompted by \IMikael Jagan's quite comprehensive PR#18543.
Rd skeletons generated by ‘prompt()’ or ‘promptData()’ now use a dummy
title (so ‘R CMD build’ works). ‘tools::checkRdContents()’ has been
updated to detect such template leftovers, including from
‘promptPackage()’.
When S4 method dispatch fails because no method was found, the error
message now includes the signature argument names; thanks to Michael
Chirico's proposal on the R-devel list.
‘withAutoprint({ .. })’ now preserves ‘srcref’s previously lost, thanks
to Andrew Simmons' report plus fix in PR#18572.
‘transform.data.frame()’ no longer adjusts names; in particular,
untransformed variables are kept as-is, including those with
syntactically invalid names (PR#17890).
The ‘keep.source’ option for Rd \Sexpr blocks is no longer ignored.
The ‘formula’ methods for ‘t.test()’ and ‘wilcox.test()’ now catch when
‘paired’ is passed, addressing PR#14359; use ‘Pair(x1, x2) ~ 1’ for a
paired test.
The level reported in the ‘browser’ prompt was often too large. It now
shows the number of browser contexts on the stack.
For ‘cbind()’ and ‘rbind()’, the optional ‘deparse.level’ argument is
now properly passed to methods, thanks to \IMikael Jagan's PR#18579 and
comments there.
Some error and warning messages for large (‘long vector’) ‘matrix(v,
nr, nc)’ and ‘dim(m) <- d’ are now correct about sizes, using ‘long
long’ formatting, fixing PR#18612 (and more) reported by \IMikael
Jagan.
‘readChar(useBytes = TRUE)’ now terminates strings even when the
underlying connection uses extra spaces in the input buffer. This
fixes problems with extra garbage seen with ‘gzip’ connections,
PR#18605.
Named capture in PCRE regular expressions now works also with more than
127 named groups (PR#18588).
Datetime functions are now robust against long jumps when dealing with
internal time zone changes. This avoids confusing warnings about an
invalid time zone, previously triggered by turning warnings into errors
or handling them via ‘tryCatch’ (PR#17966, PR#17780).
Datetime functions now restore even an empty ‘TZ’ environment variable
after internal time zone changes (PR#17724). This makes results of
datetime functions with this (typically unintentional) setting more
predictable.
‘drop.terms(*)’ now drops response as by default, ‘keep.response =
FALSE’, fixing PR#18564 thanks to \IMikael Jagan.
‘dummy.coef(.)’ now also works for ‘lm()’-models with ‘character’
categorical predictor variables rather than ‘factor’ ones, fixing
PR#18635 reported by \IJinsong Zhao.
‘formals(f) <- formals(f)’ now also works for a function w/o arguments
and atomic _constant_ ‘body(f)’.
Correct ‘as.function(<invalid list>, .)’'s error message.
‘removeSource()’ is yet more thorough in finding and removing
‘"srcref"’ and the other source references from parsed R language
chunks, fixing PR#18638 thanks to Andrew Simmons.
‘dgeom()’ is more accurate now, notably when its result is very small,
fixing PR#18642 thanks to the proposal of \IMorten Welinder, also
improving other instances where C level ‘binom_raw(x, n, ..)’ has ‘x ==
0’ or ‘x== n’.
‘warning()’ with ‘options(warn = 1)’ has improved output for multi-line
messages.
‘axis.Date()’ and ‘axis.POSIXct()’ now respect the ‘par("lab")’ setting
for the number of ‘pretty()’ intervals.
Comparisons for language objects (which are based on deparsing) are now
more careful about using accurate deparsed results (PR#18676).
Plain-text help (‘Rd2txt’) now correctly preserves blank lines
following single-line \dontrun code.
‘<POSIXlt>[*]’ no longer sets wrong ‘"balanced"’ attribute, fixing
PR#18681 thanks to \IMikael Jagan.
‘str(<classed-call>)’ now deparses the call as expected, fixing
PR#18684, reported by \IDave Slager.
In Rd examples, code following the closing brace of a \dontrun,
\dontshow or \donttest tag on the same line is no longer skipped when
‘R CMD check’ runs the examples.
‘as.data.frame(matrix(*, ncol=0))’ now gets valid ‘names()’ and
‘colnames()’; reported by \IDavis Vaughan on the R-devel list.
Internal Mathlib function ‘stirlerr(n)’ is now almost fully (52-bit)
accurate for all n >= ~5.9 and more accurate also in the range 1 --
5.9. This entails small (“after 12th decimal”) changes in density
functions, e.g., ‘dgamma()’ in _some_ regions of their support. The
fix was partly prompted by \IMorten Welinder's PR#18640.
Numbers like ‘9876543.2’ are now considered non-integer by Mathlib
internal ‘R_nonint()’, amending original fix of PR#15734.
Startup banners, ‘R --version’, ‘sessionInfo()’ and ‘R CMD check’ no
longer report ‘(64-bit)’ as part of the platform as this is almost
universal - the increasingly rare 32-bit platforms will still report
‘(32-bit)’.
On Windows, ditto for window titles.
‘is.atomic(NULL)’ now returns ‘FALSE’, as ‘NULL’ is not an atomic
vector. Strict back-compatibility would replace ‘is.atomic(foo)’ by
‘(is.null(foo) || is.atomic(foo))’ but should happen only sparingly.
.
The ‘confint()’ methods for ‘"glm"’ and ‘"nls"’ objects have been
copied to the ‘stats’ package. Previously, they were stubs which
called versions in package ‘MASS’. The ‘MASS’ namespace is no longer
loaded if you invoke (say) ‘confint(glmfit)’. Further, the ‘"glm"’
method for ‘profile()’ and the ‘plot()’ and ‘pairs()’ methods for class
‘"profile"’ have been copied from ‘MASS’ to ‘stats’. (‘profile.nls()’
and ‘plot.profile.nls()’ were already in ‘stats’.)
The ‘confint()’ and ‘profile’ methods for ‘"glm"’ objects have gained a
possibility to do profiling based on the \IRao Score statistic in
addition to the default Likelihood Ratio. This is controlled by a new
‘test =’ argument.
The ‘pairs()’ method for ‘"profile"’ objects has been extended with a
‘which =’ argument to allow plotting only a subset of the parameters.
The ‘"glm"’ method for ‘anova()’ computes test statistics and p-values
by default, using a chi-squared test or an F test depending on whether
the dispersion is fixed or free. Test statistics can be suppressed by
giving argument ‘test’ a false logical value.
In ‘setRepositories()’ the repositories can be set using their names
via ‘name =’ instead of index ‘ind =’.
‘methods()’ and ‘.S3methods()’ gain a ‘all.names’ option for the (rare)
case where functions starting with a ‘.’ should be included.
Serializations can now be interrupted (e.g., by ‘Ctrl-C’ on a
Unix-alike) if they take too long, e.g., from ‘save.image()’, thanks to
suggestions by \IIvan Krylov and others on R-devel.
New startup option ‘--max-connections’ to set the maximum number of
connections for the session. Defaults to 128 as before: allowed values
up to 4096 (but resource limits may in practice restrict to smaller
values).
R on Windows (since Windows 10 2004) now uses the new Segment Heap
allocator. This may improve performance of some memory-intensive
applications.
When R packages are built, typically by ‘R CMD build <pkg>’, the new
‘--user=<build_user>’ option overrides the (internally determined) user
name, currently ‘Sys.info()["user"]’ or ‘LOGNAME’. This is a
(modified) fulfillment of Will Landau's suggestion in PR#17530.
‘tools::testInstalledBasic()’ gets new optional arguments ‘outDir’ and
‘testSrcdir’, e.g., allowing to use it in a ‘<builddir> != <srcdir>’
setup, and in standard “binary” Windows installation *if* a source
‘tests/’ folder is present.
‘range(<DT_with_Inf>, finite = TRUE)’ now work for objects of class
‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’ with infinite entries,
analogously to ‘range.default()’, as proposed by Davis Vaughan on
R-devel. Other ‘range()’-methods can make use of new function
‘.rangeNum()’.
New ‘.internalGenerics’ object complementing ‘.S3PrimitiveGenerics’,
for documentation and low-level book-keeping.
‘grid()’ now invisibly returns the x- and y- coordinates at which the
grid-lines were drawn.
‘norm(., type)’ now also works for complex matrices.
‘kappa(., exact = TRUE, norm = *)’ now works for all norms and also for
complex matrices. In symmetric / triangular cases, new argument ‘uplo
= "U" | "L"’ allows to specify the upper or lower triangular part.
‘memDecompress(type = "unknown")’ recognizes compression in the default
‘\Izlib’ format as used by ‘memCompress(type = "gzip")’.
‘memCompress()’ and ‘memDecompress()’ will use the ‘libdeflate’ library
(<https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate>) if installed. This uses the
same type of compression for ‘type = "gzip"’ but is 1.5-2x faster than
the system ‘libz’ library on some common platforms: the speed-up may
depend on the library version.
‘diff()’ for objects of class ‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’
accepts a ‘units’ argument passed via ‘...’.
Dynamic help now does a much better job of rendering package
‘DESCRIPTION’ metadata.
‘Rprof()’ gains an ‘event’ argument and support for elapsed (real) time
profiling on Unix (PR#18076).
‘filled.contour()’ gains a ‘key.border’ argument.
‘tools::update_pkg_po()’ gets arguments ‘pot_make’ and ‘mo_make’ for
_not_ re-making the corresponding files, and additionally a ‘verbose’
argument.
Hexadecimal string colour specifications are now accepted in short
form, so, for example, we can use ‘"#123"’, which is equivalent to
‘"#112233"’.
Thanks to \IMikeFC for the original idea and \IElla Kaye, \IMalcolm Barrett, \IGeorge Stagg, and \IHanne Oberman for the patch.
Plain-text help shows \var markup by angle brackets.
The new experimental primitive function ‘declare()’ is intended to
eventually allow information about R code to be communicated to the
interpreter, compiler, and code analysis tools. The syntax for
declarations is still being developed.
Functions ‘psmirnov()’, ‘qsmirnov()’ and ‘rsmirnov()’ in package
‘stats’ have argument ‘two.sided’ renamed to ‘alternative’, to take
into account that the permutation distributions of the one-sided
statistics can be different in the case of ties. Consequence of
PR#18582.
‘sort()’ is now an implicit S4 generic in ‘methods’.
Formatting and printing, ‘format(z), print(z)’, of complex vectors ‘z’
no longer zap relatively small real or imaginary parts to zero, fixing
PR#16752. This is an API change, as it was documented previously to
round real and imaginary parts together on purpose, producing nicer
looking output. As mentioned, e.g. in the PR, this change is
compatible with many other “R-like” programming environments.
We have simplified the internal code and now basically format the real and imaginary parts independently of each other.
New experimental functions ‘Tailcall()’ and ‘Exec()’ to support writing
stack-space-efficient recursive functions.
Where characters are attempted to be plotted by ‘pdf()’, ‘postscript()’
and ‘xfig()’ which are not in the selected 8-bit character set (most
often Latin-1) and the R session is using a UTF-8 locale, the warning
messages will show the UTF-8 character rather than its bytes and one
dot will be substituted per character rather than per byte. (Platforms
whose ‘iconv()’ does transliteration silently plot the
transliteration.)
In a UTF-8 locale some transliterations are now done with a warning (e.g., dashes and Unicode minus to hyphen, ligatures are expanded, \Ipermille (‘‰’) is replaced by ‘o/oo’), although the OS may have got there first. These are warnings as they will continue to be replaced by dots in earlier versions of R.
The matrix multiplication functions ‘crossprod()’ and ‘tcrossprod()’
are now also primitive and S3 generic, as ‘%*%’ had become in R 4.3.0.
‘source()’ and ‘example()’ have a new optional argument ‘catch.aborts’
which allows continued evaluation of the R code after an error.
The non-Quartz ‘tiff()’ devices allow additional types of compression
if supported by the platform's ‘libtiff’ library.
The list of base and recommended package names is now provided by
‘tools::standard_package_names()’.
‘cairo_pdf()’ and ‘cairo_ps()’ default to ‘onefile = TRUE’ to closer
match ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’.
New option ‘catch.script.errors’ provides a documented way to catch
errors and then continue in non-interactive use.
‘L %||% R’ newly in ‘base’ is an expressive idiom for the phrases
‘if(!is.null(L)) L else R’ or ‘if(is.null(L)) R else L’.
The return value from ‘warnings()’ now always inherits from
‘"warnings"’ as documented, now also in the case of no warnings where
it previously returned ‘NULL’.
‘as.complex("1i")’ now returns ‘0 + 1i’ instead of ‘NA’ with a warning.
‘z <- c(NA, 1i)’ now keeps the imaginary part ‘Im(z[1]) == 0’, no
longer coercing to ‘NA_complex_’. Similarly, ‘cumsum(z)’ correctly
sums real and imaginary parts separately, i.e., without “crosstalk” in
case of ‘NA’s.
On Alpine Linux ‘iconv()’ now maps ‘"latin2"’, ‘"latin-2"’, ‘"latin9"’
and ‘"latin-9"’ to encoding names the OS knows about
(case-insensitively).
‘iconv(sub = "Unicode")’ now always zero-pads to four (hex) digits,
rather than to 4 or 8. (This seems to have become the convention once
Unicode restricted the number of Unicode points to 2^21 - 1 and so will
never need more than 6 digits.)
‘NCOL(NULL)’ now returns 0 instead of 1, for consistency with
‘cbind()’.
The information for the Euro glyph missing from the Adobe ‘.afm’ files
for the Courier, Helvetica and Times families has been copied from
their URW equivalents - this will improve vertical centring in the
‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ devices.
The included BLAS sources have been updated to those shipped with
LAPACK version 3.12.0. The changes are almost entirely cosmetic.
The included LAPACK sources have been updated to version 3.12.0 and
some further double-complex routines added.
There are new font families for the 2014-5 URW 2.0 fonts (see ‘?pdf’)
which are included in recent versions of Ghostscript. These have font
widths for most Greek glyphs and a few others which were missing from
the original versions (whose font families remain available for
reproducibility, although Ghostscript-based viewers will render using
the 2.0 versions).
Improve the large-n efficiency of ‘as.matrix(<dist>)’, thanks an R
contributors effort, notably by Tim Taylor and Heather Turner, see
PR#18660.
The default and ‘numeric’ methods of ‘all.equal()’ get a ‘check.class’
option.
‘zapsmall()’ gets new optional arguments, function ‘mFUN’ and ‘min.d’,
for extra flexibility; fulfills a wish in PR#18199. Also, it is now an
implicit S4 generic in package ‘methods’.
The Rd filter for ‘aspell()’ gains an ‘ignore’ argument.
New generic function ‘sort_by()’, primarily useful for the ‘data.frame’
method which can be used to sort rows of a data frame by one or more
columns.
Licence headers for the RPC code in ‘src/extra/xdr’ have been updated
to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle America in 2010.
New function ‘pkg2HTML()’ in ‘tools’ to create single-page HTML reference manuals for R packages.
[None yet.]
The parser has been updated to work with \Ibison 3.8.2, which is now
used for the pre-generated parsers in ‘gram.c’, ‘file.c’, and
‘gramRd.c’. A few parser error messages have changed, which may affect
code that relies on exact messages.
.
System \Ivalgrind headers are now required to use ‘configure’ option
‘--with-valgrind-instrumentation’ with value ‘1’ or ‘2’.
‘configure’ will warn if it encounters a 32-bit build, as that is
nowadays almost untested.
Environment variable ‘R_SYSTEM_ABI’ is no longer used and so no longer
recorded in ‘etc/Renviron’ (it was not on Windows and was only ever
used when preparing package ‘tools’).
If the ‘libdeflate’ library and headers are available, ‘libdeflate’
rather than ‘libz’ is used to (de)compress R objects in lazy-load
databases, Typically tasks spend up to 5% of their time on such
operations, although creating lazy-data databases is one of the
exceptions.
This can be suppressed if the library is available by the ‘configure’ option ‘--without-libdeflate-compression’.
‘configure’ option ‘--enable-lto=check’ has not worked reliably since
2019 and has been removed.
The minimum ‘autoconf’ requirement for a maintainer build has been
increased to ‘autoconf’ 2.71.
It is intended to increase this to 2.72 for R 4.5.0: the distributed ‘configure’ file was generated using 2.72.
No default C++ compiler is set if no C++17 compiler is detected: there
is no longer an automatic fallback to C++14 or C++11.
Compilers from the last five years should have sufficient support: for others macros ‘CXX’ and ‘CXXSTD’ can be set in file ‘config.site’ to provide a fallback if needed.
The ObjectiveC++ compiler now by default uses the standard selected by R for C++ (currently C++17) rather than the default standard for the C++ compiler (which on macOS is still C++98).
The minimum ‘autoconf’ requirement for a maintainer build has been increased to ‘autoconf’ 2.72.
.
Headers ‘R_ext/Applic.h’ and ‘R-ext/Linpack.h’ used to include
‘R_ext/BLAS.h’ although this was undocumented and unneeded by their
documented entry points. They no longer do so.
New function ‘R_missing()’, factored out from ‘do_missing()’, used to
fix PR#18579.
‘SEXP’ type ‘S4SXP’ has been renamed to ‘OBJSXP’ to support
experimenting with alternative object systems. The ‘S4SXP’ value can
still be used in ‘C’ code but is now deprecated. Based on
contributions from the R Consortium's Object-Oriented Programming
Working Group.
New function ‘pow1p(x,y)’ for accurate ‘(1+x)^y’.
.
‘data()’ no longer handles zipped data from long-defunct (since R
2.13.0) ‘--use-zip-data’ installations.
The legacy graphics devices ‘pictex()’ and ‘xfig()’ are now deprecated.
They do not support recent graphics enhancements and their
font-handling is rudimentary. The intention is to retain them for
historical interest as long as they remain somewhat functional.
Support for ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ has been removed from the ‘pdf()’
and ‘postscript()’ devices - this was a legacy encoding supporting
classic macOS up to 2001 and no longer has universal ‘libiconv’
support.
‘is.R()’ is deprecated as no other S dialect is known to be in use (and
this could only identify historical dialects, not future ones).
Further information on calls can be obtained by setting the environment variable ‘_R_DEPRECATED_IS_R_’ to ‘error’ which turns the deprecation warning into an error and so by default gives a traceback. (This is done by ‘R CMD check --as-cran’.)
‘UseMethod()’ no longer forwards local variables assigned in the
generic function into method call environments before evaluating the
method body. This makes method calls behave more like standard function
calls and makes method code easier to analyze correctly.
The twelve ‘as.data.frame.<class>()’ methods which were deprecated only
via ‘_R_CHECK_AS_DATA_FRAME_EXPLICIT_METHOD_’ and in ‘R CMD check
--as-cran’ are formally deprecated now in favour of calling
‘as.data.frame()’ or ‘as.data.frame.vector()’. The deprecation “check”
now works also when ‘as.data.frame()’ is S4 generic thanks to \IIvan
Krylov.
The default method for the directional comparison operators ‘<’, ‘>’,
‘<=’, and ‘>=’ now signals an error when one of the operands is a
language objects, i.e. a symbol or a call.
For ‘terms.formula()’, deprecate ‘abb’ and ‘neg.out’ arguments
_formally_ in addition to just documenting it.
‘is.R()’ is defunct. [Soon ....]
Licence headers for the RPC code in ‘src/extra/xdr’ have been updated to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle America in 2010.
New function ‘pkg2HTML()’ in ‘tools’ to create single-page HTML reference manuals for R packages.
No default C++ compiler is set if no C++17 compiler is detected: there is no longer an automatic fallback to C++14 or C++11.
Compilers from the last five years should have sufficient support: for others macros ‘CXX’ and ‘CXXSTD’ can be set in file ‘config.site’ to provide a fallback if needed.
The ObjectiveC++ compiler now by default uses the standard selected by R for C++ (currently C++17) rather than the default standard for the C++ compiler (which on macOS is still C++98).
For ‘terms.formula()’, deprecate ‘abb’ and ‘neg.out’ arguments _formally_ in addition to just documenting it.
Numbers like ‘9876543.2’ are now considered non-integer by Mathlib internal ‘R_nonint()’, amending original fix of PR#15734.
The minimum ‘autoconf’ requirement for a maintainer build has been increased to ‘autoconf’ 2.71.
It is intended to increase this to 2.72 for R 4.5.0: the distributed ‘configure’ file was generated using 2.72.
Internal Mathlib function ‘stirlerr(n)’ is now almost fully (52-bit) accurate for all n >= ~5.9 and more accurate also in the range 1 -- 5.9. This entails small (“after 12th decimal”) changes in density functions, e.g., ‘dgamma()’ in _some_ regions of their support. The fix was partly prompted by \IMorten Welinder's PR#18640.
Licence headers for the RPC code in ‘src/extra/xdr’ have been updated to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle America in 2010.
The makefiles and installer scripts for Windows have been tailored to \IRtools44, an update of the \IRtools43 toolchain. It is based on GCC 13 and newer versions of \IMinGW-W64, \Ibinutils and libraries (targeting 64-bit Intel CPUs). R-devel can no longer be built using \IRtools43 without changes.
\IRtools44 has experimental support for 64-bit ARM (\Iaarch64) CPUs via \ILLVM 17 toolchain using ‘lld’, ‘clang’/‘flang-new’ and \Ilibc++.
The twelve ‘as.data.frame.<class>()’ methods which were deprecated only via ‘_R_CHECK_AS_DATA_FRAME_EXPLICIT_METHOD_’ and in ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ are formally deprecated now in favour of calling ‘as.data.frame()’ or ‘as.data.frame.vector()’. The deprecation “check” now works also when ‘as.data.frame()’ is S4 generic thanks to \IIvan Krylov.
New generic function ‘sort_by()’, primarily useful for the ‘data.frame’ method which can be used to sort rows of a data frame by one or more columns.
Licence headers for the RPC code in src/extra/xdr have been updated to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle America in 2010.
‘as.data.frame(matrix(*, ncol=0))’ now gets valid ‘names()’ and ‘colnames()’; reported by \IDavis Vaughan on the R-devel list.
The parser has been updated to work with \Ibison 3.8.2, which is now used for the pre-generated parsers in ‘gram.c’, ‘file.c’, and ‘gramRd.c’. A few parser error messages have changed, which may affect code that relies on exact messages.
‘R CMD check’ now warns about non-ASCII characters in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file (in addition to R files). Such packages are not portable and may fail to install on some platforms.
The default method for the directional comparison operators ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘<=’, and ‘>=’ now signals an error when one of the operands is a language objects, i.e. a symbol or a call.
‘UseMethod()’ no longer forwards local variables assigned in the generic function into method call environments before evaluating the method body. This makes method calls behave more like standard function calls and makes method code easier to analyze correctly.
The twelve ‘as.data.frame.<class>()’ methods which were deprecated only via ‘_R_CHECK_AS_DATA_FRAME_EXPLICIT_METHOD_’ and in ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ are formally deprecated now in favour of calling ‘as.data.frame()’ or ‘as.data.frame.vector()’. The deprecation “check” now works also when ‘as.data.frame()’ is S4 generic thanks to Ivan Krylov.
The makefiles and installer scripts for Windows have been tailored to \IRtools44, an update of the \IRtools43 toolchain. It is based on GCC 13 and newer versions of \IMinGW-W64, \Ibinutils and libraries (targeting 64-bit Intel CPUs). R-devel can no longer be built using \IRtools43 without changes.
\IRtools44 has experimental suport for 64-bit ARM (aarch64) CPUs via LLVM 17 toolchain using lld, clang/flang-new and libc++.
The minimum ‘autoconf’ requirement for a maintainer build has been increased to ‘autoconf’ 2.71.
It is intended to increase this to 2.72 once that becomes widely available: the distributed ‘configure’ file was generated using 2.72.
In Rd examples, code following the closing brace of a \dontrun, \dontshow or \donttest tag on the same line is no longer skipped when ‘R CMD check’ runs the examples.
‘R CMD build’ when there is no ‘NAMESPACE’, now uses the recommended ‘exportPattern("^[^.]")’, instead of exporting everything.
‘is.R()’ is deprecated as no other S dialect is known to be in use (and this could only identify historical dialects, not future ones).
Further information on calls can be obtained by setting the environment variable ‘_R_DEPRECATED_IS_R_’ to ‘error’ which turns the deprecation warning into an error and so by default gives a traceback. (This is done by ‘R CMD check --as-cran’.)
‘is.R()’ is deprecated as no other S dialect is known to be in use (and this could only identify historical dialects, not future ones).
Further information on calls can be obtained by setting the environment variable ‘_R_DEPRECATED_IS_R_’ to ‘error’ which turns the deperecation warning into an error and so by default gives a traceback. (This is done by ‘R CMD check --as-cran’.)
‘UseMethod()’ no longer forwards local variables assigned in the generic function into method call environments before evaluating the method body. This makes method calls behave more like standard function calls and makes method code easier to analyze correctly. For now, attempts to use these variables in a method will signal an error; this will eventually be dropped.
‘str(<classed-call>)’ now deparses the call as expected, fixing PR#18684, reported by \IDave Slager.
‘range(<DT_with_Inf>, finite = TRUE)’ now work for objects of class ‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’ with infinite entries, analogously to ‘range.default()’, as proposed by Davis Vaughan on R-devel. Other ‘range()’-methods can make use of new function ‘.rangeNum()’.
New ‘.internalGenerics’ object complementing ‘.S3PrimitiveGenerics’, for documentation and low-level book-keeping.
Dynamic help now does a much better job of rendering package ‘DESCRIPTION’ metadata.
‘filled.contour()’ gains a ‘key.border’ argument.
‘tools::update_pkg_po()’ gets arguments ‘pot_make’ and ‘mo_make’ for _not_ re-making the corresponding files, and additionally a ‘verbose’ argument.
Plain-text help shows \var markup by angle brackets.
Functions ‘psmirnov()’, ‘qsmirnov()’ and ‘rsmirnov()’ in package ‘stats’ have argument ‘two.sided’ renamed to ‘alternative’, to take into account that the permutation distributions of the one-sided statistics can be different in the case of ties. Consequence of PR#18582.
New experimental functions ‘Tailcall()’ and ‘Exec()’ to support writing stack-space-efficient recursive functions.
New option ‘catch.script.errors’ provides a documented way to catch errors and then continue in non-interactive use.
‘L %||% R’ newly in ‘base’ is an expressive idiom for the phrases ‘if(!is.null(L)) L else R’ or ‘if(is.null(L)) R else L’.
The return value from ‘warnings()’ now always inherits from ‘"warnings"’ as documented, now also in the case of no warnings where it previously returned ‘NULL’.
On Alpine Linux ‘iconv()’ now maps ‘"latin2"’, ‘"latin-2"’, ‘"latin9"’ and ‘"latin-9"’ to encoding names the OS knows about (case-insensitively).
‘iconv(sub = "Unicode")’ now always zero-pads to four (hex) digits, rather than to 4 or 8. (This seems to have become the convention once Unicode restricted the number of Unicode points to 2^21 - 1 and so will never need more than 6 digits.)
‘zapsmall()’ gets new optional arguments, function ‘mFUN’ and ‘min.d’, for extra flexibility; fulfills a wish in PR#18199. Also, it is now an implicit S4 generic in package ‘methods’.
System \Ivalgrind headers are now required to use ‘configure’ option ‘--with-valgrind-instrumentation’ with value ‘1’ or ‘2’.
The minimum ‘autoconf’ requirement for a maintainer build has been increased to ‘autoconf’ 2.71.
It is intended to increase this to 2.72 once that becomes widely available.
No default C++ compiler is set if no C++17 compiler is detected: there is no longer an automatic fallback to C++14 or C++11.
Compilers from the last five years should have sufficient support: for others macros ‘CXX’ and ‘CXXSTD’ can be set in file ‘config.site’ to provide a fallback if needed.
A new ‘configure’ option ‘--with-newAccelerate’ makes use of Apple's ‘new’ BLAS / LAPACK interfaces in their Accelerate framework. Those interfaces are only available in macOS 13.3 or later, and building requires SDK 13.3 or later (from the Command Line Tools or \IXcode 14.3 or later).
By default the option uses new Accelerate for BLAS calls: to also use it for LAPACK use option ‘--with-newAccelerate=lapack’. The later interfaces provide LAPACK 3.9.1 rather than 3.2.1: 3.9.1 is from 2021-04 and does not include the improved algorithms introduced in LAPACK 3.10.0 (including for BLAS calls).
The new built-in Rd macro \dontdiff{} can be used to mark example code whose output should be ignored when comparing check output to reference output (‘tests/Examples/<pkg>-Ex.Rout.save’). The \dontdiff tag, like \donttest, is _not_ shown on the rendered help page, so provides a clean alternative to ‘## IGNORE_RDIFF_(BEGIN|END)’ comments.
‘SEXP’ type ‘S4SXP’ has been renamed to ‘OBJSXP’ to support experimenting with alternative object systems. The ‘S4SXP’ value can still be used in ‘C’ code but is now deprecated. Based on contributions from the R Consortium's Object-Oriented Programming Working Group.
Support for ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ has been removed from the ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ devices - this was a legacy encoding supporting classic macOS up to 2001 and no longer has universal ‘libiconv’ support.
The twelve ‘as.data.frame.<class>()’ methods which were deprecated only via ‘_R_CHECK_AS_DATA_FRAME_EXPLICIT_METHOD_’ and in ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ are formally deprecated now in favour of calling ‘as.data.frame()’ or ‘as.data.frame.vector()’.
‘<POSIXlt>[*]’ no longer sets wrong ‘"balanced"’ attribute, fixing PR#18681 thanks to \IMikael Jagan.
‘str(<classed-call>)’ now deparses the call as expected, fixing PR#18684, reported by Dave Slager.
Probability distribution functions ‘[dpq]<distrib>(x, *)’, but also ‘bessel[IKJY](x, .)’ now consistently preserve ‘attributes(x)’ when ‘length(x) == 0’, e.g., for a 2 x 0 matrix, thanks to \IKarolis Koncevičius' report PR#18509.
Directories are now omitted by ‘file.copy(, recursive = FALSE)’ and in ‘file.append()’ (PR#17337).
‘density()’ more consistently computes grid values for the FFT-based convolution, following \IRobert Schlicht's analysis and proposal in PR#18337, correcting density values typically by a factor of about 0.999. Argument ‘old.coords = TRUE’ provides back compatibility.
Comparisons for language objects (which are based on deparsing) are now more careful about using accurate deparsed results (PR#18676).
The 12 ‘as.data.frame.<class>()’ methods which were deprecated only via ‘_R_CHECK_AS_DATA_FRAME_EXPLICIT_METHOD_’ and in ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ are formally deprecated now in favour of calling ‘as.data.frame()’ or ‘as.data.frame.vector()’.