This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
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 Rao Score statistic in addition to the default Likelihood Ratio. This is controlled by a new ‘test =’ argument.
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 Ivan 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 ‘.rangeNum()’.
New ‘.internalGenerics’ 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 ‘zlib’ 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 rendering package ‘DESCRIPTION’ metadata.
‘Rprof()’ gains an ‘event’ argument and support for elapsed (real) time profiling on Unix (PR#18076).
‘filled.contour()’ gains ‘key.border’ argument.
‘tools::update_pkg_po()’ gets ‘pot_make’ and ‘mo_make’ options for _not_ re-making the corresponding files, and additionally option ‘verbose’.
Hexadecimal string colour specifications are now accepted in short form, so, for example, we can use ‘"#123"’, which is equivalent to ‘"#112233"’.
Thanks to MikeFC for the original idea and Ella Kaye, Malcolm Barrett, George Stagg, and Hanne Oberman for the patch.
Plain-text help shows \var markup with 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’ changed 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 to 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, permille (‘‰’) 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 continue in non-interactive use.
‘L %||% R’ newly in base is an expressive idiom for the ‘if(!is.null(L)) L else R’ or ‘if(is.null(L)) R else L’ phrases.
‘warnings()’ now always inherits from ‘"warnings"’ as documented, newly also in the case of no warnings, where it previously returned ‘NULL’.
‘as.complex("1i")’ now returns ‘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 names the OS knows about (case-insensitively).
‘iconv(sub = "Unicode")’ now 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 2^31 - 1 and so will never need more than 6 digits.)
‘NCOL(NULL)’ now returns 0 instead of 1, for consistency with ‘cbind()’.
Support for ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ has been removed from the ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ devices - this was a legacy encoding supporting classic macOS up to 2001 (with various revisions), and no longer has universal ‘libiconv’ support.
System valgrind headers are 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.
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 Xcode 14.3 or later).
By default the option uses new Accelerate for BLAS calls: to also use it for LAPACK use ‘--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).
‘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’ 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 --as-cran’ 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 _description_-like entries of the form \item{label}{description}.
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 ‘R_missing()’, factored out from ‘do_missing()’, used to fix PR#18579.
‘SEXP’ type ‘S4SXP’ has been renamed ‘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 Object-Oriented Programming Working Group.
‘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.
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 (Jack Berry).
Probability distribution functions ‘[dpq]<distrib>(x, *)’, but also ‘bessel[IKJY](x, .)’ are now consistently preserving ‘attributes(x)’ when ‘length(x) == 0’, e.g., for a 2 x 0 matrix, thanks to Karolis 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 Ivan 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 dialogs created on Windows using GraphApp has been fixed (PR#13870).
‘density()’ more consistently computes grid values for the FFT-based convolution, following Robert Schlicht's analysis and proposal in PR#18337, correcting density values typically by a factor of about 0.999. Optional ‘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 Kirill 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 Peter Meilstrup's report on R-devel and Ivan 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 Mikael 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 R-devel.
‘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 Mikael 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 Mikael Jagan.
‘readChar(useBytes = TRUE)’ now terminates strings even when the underlying connection uses extra spacea 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 Mikael Jagan.
‘dummy.coef(.)’ now also works for ‘lm()’-models with ‘character’ categorical predictor variables rather than ‘factor’ ones, fixing PR#18635 reported by Jinsong 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.
The legacy ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ is deprecated in ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’: support was incomplete in earlier versions of R.
‘drop.terms(*, dropx = <0-length>)’ now works, fixing PR#18563 as proposed by Mikael Jagan.
‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ support for the documented Adobe encodings ‘"Greek"’ and ‘"Cyrilllic"’ was missing (although the corresponding Windows' codepages could be used).
‘readChar(useBytes = TRUE)’ now terminates strings even when the underlying connection uses extra spacea in the input buffer. This fixes problems with extra garbage seen with ‘gzip’ connections, PR#18605.
The legacy ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ is deprecated in ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’: support was incomplete in earlier versions of R.
‘drop.terms(*, dropx = <0-length>)’ now works, fixing PR#18563 as proposed by Mikael Jagan.
‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ support for the documented Adobe encodings ‘"Greek"’ and ‘"Cyrilllic"’ was missing (although the corresponding Windows' codepages could be used).