Daily News about R-3-4-branch/NEWS

This blog is updated daily.

‘factor()’ now uses ‘order()’ to sort its levels, not ‘sort.list()’. This makes ‘factor()’ support custom vector-like objects if methods for the appropriate generics are defined. This change has the side effect of making ‘factor()’ succeed on empty or length-one non-atomic vector(-like) types (e.g., list), where it failed before.
Matrix products now consistently bypass BLAS when the inputs have ‘NaN’/‘Inf’ values. Performance of the check of inputs has been improved. Performance when BLAS is used is improved for matrix/vector and vector/matrix multiplication (DGEMV is now used instead of DGEMM).

One can now choose from alternative matrix product implementations _via_ ‘options(matprod = )’. The ‘"internal"’ implementation is not optimized for speed but consistent in precision with other summations in R (using ‘long double’ accumulators where available). ‘"blas"’ calls BLAS directly for best speed, but usually with undefined behavior for inputs with ‘NaN’/‘Inf’.

Formatting and printing of bibliography entries (‘bibentry’) now by default shows the bibtex code also when there is more than one entry. This also affects ‘citation()’: use ‘options(citation.bibtex.max = 1)’ to revert to previous behavior.

Make variables with names containing ‘CXX1X’ are deprecated in favour of those using ‘CXX11’, but for the time being are still made available _via_ file ‘etc/Makeconf’. Packages using them should be converted to the new forms and made dependent on ‘R (>= 3.4.0)’.

(C-level Native routine registration.) The deprecated ‘styles’ member of the ‘R_CMethodDef’ and ‘R_FortranMethodDef’ structures has been removed. Packages using these will need to be re-installed for R 3.4.0.