This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
It is planned that the 4.1.x series will be the last to support 32-bit Windows, with production of binary packages for that series continuing until early 2023.
Data set ‘esoph’ in package ‘datasets’ now provides the correct numbers of controls; previously it had the numbers of cases added to these. (Reported by Alexander Fowler in PR#17964.)
‘www.omegahat.net’ is no longer one of the repositories known by default to ‘setRepositories()’. (Nowadays it only provides source packages and is often unavailable.)
Function ‘package_dependencies()’ (in package ‘tools’) can now use different dependency types for direct and recursive dependencies.
The checking of the size of tarball in ‘R CMD check --as-cran <pkg>’ may be tweaked via the new environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_CRAN_INCOMING_TARBALL_THRESHOLD_’, as suggested in PR#17777 by Jan Gorecki.
Using ‘c()’ to combine a factor with other factors now gives a factor, an ordered factor when combining ordered factors with identical levels.
‘apply()’ gains a ‘simplify’ argument to allow disabling of simplification of results.
The ‘format()’ method for class ‘"ftable"’ gets a new option ‘justify’. (Suggested by Thomas Soeiro.)
New ‘...names()’ utility. (Proposed by Neal Fultz in PR#17705.)
‘type.convert()’ now warns when its ‘as.is’ argument is not specified, as the help file always said it _should_. In that case, the default is changed to ‘TRUE’ in line with its change in ‘read.table()’ (related to ‘stringsAsFactor’) in R 4.0.0.
When printing list arrays, classed objects are now shown _via_ their ‘format()’ value if this is a short enough character string, or by giving the first elements of their class vector and their length.
‘capabilities()’ gets new entry ‘"Rprof"’ which is ‘TRUE’ when R has been configured with the equivalent of ‘--enable-R-profiling’ (as it is by default). (Related to Michael Orlitzky's report PR#17836.)
‘str(xS4)’ now also shows extraneous attributes of an S4 object ‘xS4’.
Rudimentary support for vi-style tags in ‘rtags()’ and ‘R CMD rtags’ has been added. (Based on a patch from Neal Fultz in PR#17214.)
‘checkRdContents()’ is now exported from ‘tools’; it and also ‘checkDocFiles()’ have a new option ‘chkInternal’ allowing to check Rd files marked with keyword ‘"internal"’ as well. The latter can be activated for ‘R CMD check’ via experimental environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_RD_INTERNAL_TOO_’.
New functions ‘numToBits()’ and ‘numToInts()’ extend the ‘raw’ conversion utilities to (double precision) ‘numeric’.
Functions ‘URLencode()’ and ‘URLdecode()’ in package ‘utils’ now work on vectors of URIs. (Based on patch from Bob Rudis submitted with PR#17873.)
‘path.expand()’ can expand ‘~user’ on most Unix-alikes even when ‘readline’ is not in use. It tries harder to expand ‘~’, for example should environment variable ‘HOME’ be unset.
For HTML help (both dynamic and static), Rd file links to help pages in external packages are now treated as references to topics rather than file names, and fall back to a file link only if the topic is not found in the target package. The earlier rule which prioritized file names over topics can be restored by setting the environment variable ‘_R_HELP_LINKS_TO_TOPICS_’ to a false value.
‘c()’ now removes ‘NULL’ arguments before dispatching to methods, thus simplifying the implementation of ‘c()’ methods, _but_ for back compatibility keeps ‘NULL’ when it is the first argument. (From a report and patch proposal by Lionel Henry in PR#17900.)
‘Vectorize()’'s result function's environment no longer keeps unneeded objects.
Function ‘...elt()’ now propagates visibility consistently with ‘..n’. (Thanks to Lionel Henry's PR#17905.)
‘capture.output()’ no longer uses non-standard evaluation to evaluate its arguments. This makes evaluation of functions like ‘parent.frame()’ more consistent. (Thanks to Lionel Henry's PR#17907.)
‘packBits(bits, type="double")’ now works as inverse of ‘numToBits()’. (Thanks to Bill Dunlap's proposal in PR#17914.)
‘curlGetHeaders()’ has two new arguments, ‘timeout’ to specify the timeout for that call (overriding ‘getOption("timeout")’) and ‘TLS’ to specify the minimum TLS protocol version to be used for ‘https://’ URIs (_inter alia_ providing a means to check for sites using deprecated TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1).
For ‘nls()’, an optional constant ‘scaleOffset’ may be added to the denominator of the relative offset convergence test for cases where the fit of a model is expected to be exact, thanks to a proposal by John Nash. ‘nls(*, trace=TRUE)’ now also shows the convergence criterion.
Numeric differentiation _via_ ‘numericDeriv()’ gets new optional arguments ‘eps’ and ‘central’, the latter for taking central divided differences. The latter can be activated for ‘nls()’ via ‘nls.control(nDcentral = TRUE)’.
‘nls()’ now passes the ‘trace’ and ‘control’ arguments to ‘getInitial()’, notably for all self-starting models, so these can also be fit in zero-noise situations via a ‘scaleOffset’. For this reason, the ‘initial’ function of a ‘selfStart’ model must now have ‘...’ in its argument list.
‘bquote(splice = TRUE)’ can now splice expression vectors with attributes: this makes it possible to splice the result of ‘parse(keep.source = TRUE)’. (Report and patch provided by Lionel Henry in PR#17869.)
‘textConnection()’ gets an optional ‘name’ argument.
‘get()’, ‘exists()’, and ‘get0()’ now signal an error if the first argument has length greater than 1. Previously additional elements were silently ignored. (Suggested by Antoine Fabri on R-devel.)
R now provides a shorthand notation for creating functions, e.g. ‘\(x) x + 1’ is parsed as ‘function(x) x + 1’. This feature is experimental and may change prior to release.
R now provides a simple native forward pipe syntax ‘|>’. The simple form of the forward pipe inserts the left-hand side as the first argument in the right-hand side call. The pipe implementation as a syntax transformation was motivated by suggestions from Jim Hester and Lionel Henry. This feature is experimental and may change prior to release.
‘all.equal(f, g)’ for ‘function’s now by default also compares their ‘environment(.)’s, notably via new ‘all.equal’ method for class ‘function’. Comparison of ‘nls()’ fits, e.g., may now need ‘all.equal(m1, m2, check.environment = FALSE)’.
‘.libPaths()’ gets a new option ‘include.site’, allowing to _not_ include the site library. (Thanks to Dario Strbenac's suggestion and Gabe Becker's PR#18016.)
Lithuanian translations are now available. (Thanks to Rimantas Žakauskas.)
‘names()’ now works for ‘DOTSXP’ objects. On the other hand, in ‘R-lang’, the R language manual, we now warn against relying on the structure or even existence of such ‘dot-dot-dot’ objects.
‘all.equal()’ no longer gives an error on ‘DOTSXP’ objects.
‘capabilities("cairo")’ now applies only to the file-based devices as it is now possible (if very unusual) to build R with Cairo support for those but not for ‘X11()’.
There is optional support for tracing the progress of ‘loadNamespace()’ - see its help.
(Not Windows.) ‘l10n_info()’ reports an additional element, the name of the encoding as reported by the OS (which may differ from the encoding part (if any) of the result from ‘Sys.getlocale("LC_CTYPE")’.
New function ‘gregexec()’ which generalizes ‘regexec()’ to find _all_ disjoint matches and well as all substrings corresponding to parenthesized subexpressions of the given regular expression. (Contributed by Brodie Gaslam.)
New function ‘charClass()’ in package ‘utils’ to query the wide-character classification functions in use (such as ‘iswprint’).
The names of ‘quantile()’'s result no longer depend on the global ‘getOption("digits")’, but ‘quantile()’ gets a new optional argument ‘digits = 7’ instead.
‘grep()’, ‘sub()’, ‘regexp’ and variants work considerably faster for long factors with few levels. (Thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18063.)
Provide grouping of ‘x11()’ graphics windows within a window manager such as ‘Gnome’ or ‘Unity’; thanks to a patch by Ivan Krylov posted to R-devel.
The ‘split()’ method for class ‘data.frame’ now allows the ‘f’ argument to be specified as a formula.
‘sprintf’ now warns on arguments unused by the format string.
New palettes ‘"Rocket"’ and ‘"Mako"’ for ‘hcl.colors()’ (approximating palettes of the same name from the 'viridisLite' package).
Contributed by Achim Zeileis.
The base environment and its namespace are now locked (so one can no longer add bindings to these or remove from these).
‘Rterm’ handling of multi-byte characters has been improved, allowing use of such characters when supported by the current locale.
‘Rterm’ now accepts ‘ALT+ +xxxxxxxx’ sequences to enter Unicode characters as hex digits.
Environment variable ‘LC_ALL’ on Windows now takes precedence over ‘LC_CTYPE’ and variables for other supported categories, matching the POSIX behaviour.
The graphics engine version, ‘R_GE_version’, has been bumped to ‘14’ and so packages that provide graphics devices should be reinstalled.
Graphics devices should now specify ‘deviceVersion’ to indicate what version of the graphics engine they support.
Graphics devices can now specify ‘deviceClip’. If ‘TRUE’, the graphics engine will never perform any clipping of output itself.
The clipping that the graphics engine does perform (for both ‘canClip = TRUE’ and ‘canClip = FALSE’) has been improved to avoid producing unnecessary artifacts in clipped output.
The ‘grid’ package now allows ‘gpar(fill)’ to be a ‘linearGradient()’, a ‘radialGradient()’, or a ‘pattern()’. The ‘viewport(clip)’ can now also be a grob, which defines a clipping path, and there is a new ‘viewport(mask)’ that can also be a grob, which defines a mask.
These new features are only supported so far on the Cairo-based graphics devices and on the ‘pdf()’ device.
(Not Windows.) A warning is given when a Cairo-based type is specified for a ‘png()’, ‘jpeg()’, ‘tiff()’ or ‘bmp()’ device but Cairo is unsupported (so ‘type = "Xlib"’ is tried instead).
‘grSoftVersion()’ now reports the versions of FreeType and FontConfig if they are used directly (not _via_ Pango), as is most commonly done on macOS.
The _standalone_ ‘libRmath’ math library and R's C API now provide ‘log1pexp()’ again as documented, and gain ‘log1mexp()’.
‘configure’ checks for a program ‘pkgconf’ if program ‘pkg-config’ is not found. These are now only looked for on the path (like almost all other programs) so if needed specify a full path to the command in ‘PKG_CONFIG’, for example in file ‘config.site’.
C99 function ‘iswblank’ is required - it was last seen missing ca 2003 so the workaround has been removed.
There are new ‘configure’ options ‘--with-internal-iswxxxxx’, ‘--with-internal-towlower’ and ‘--with-internal-wcwidth’ which allows the system functions for wide-character classification, case-switching and width (‘wcwidth’ and ‘wcswidth’) to be replaced by internal ones. The first has long been used on macOS, AIX (and Windows) but this enables it to be unselected there and selected for other platforms (it is the new default on Solaris). The second is new in this version of R and is selected by default on macOS and Solaris. The third has long been the default and remains so as it contains customizations for East Asian languages.
System versions of these functions are often minimally implemented (sometimes only for ASCII characters) and may not cover the full range of Unicode points: for example Solaris (and Windows) only cover the Basic Multilingual Plane.
Cairo installations without X11 are more likely to be detected by ‘configure’, when the file-based Cairo graphics devices will be available but not ‘X11(type = "cairo")’.
There is a new ‘configure’ option ‘--with-static-cairo’ which is the default on macOS. This should be used when only static cairo (and where relevant, Pango) libraries are available.
Cairo-based graphics devices on platforms without Pango but with FreeType/FontConfig will make use of the latter for font selection.
Configuring with flag ‘--enable-lto=R’ now also uses LTO when installing the recommended packages.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ and ‘R CMD SHLIB’ have a new flag ‘--use-LTO’ to use LTO when compiling code, for use with R configured with ‘--enable-lto=R’. For R configured with ‘--enable-lto’, they have the new flag ‘--no-use-LTO’.
Packages can opt in or out of LTO compilation _via_ a ‘UseLTO’ field in the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file. (As usual this can be overridden by the command-line flags.)
for GCC >= 8, ‘FC_LEN_T’ is defined in ‘config.h’ and hence character lengths are passed from C to Fortran in _inter alia_ BLAS and LAPACK calls.
There is a new text file ‘src/gnuwin32/README.compilation’, which outlines how C/Fortran code compilation is organized and documents new features:
• R can be built with Link-Time Optimization with a suitable compiler - doing so with GCC 9.2 showed several inconsistencies which have been corrected.
• There is support for cross-compiling the C and Fortran code in R and standard packages on suitable (Linux) platforms. This is mainly intended to allow developers to test later versions of compilers - for example using GCC 9.2 or 10.x has detected issues that GCC 8.3 in Rtools40 does not.
• There is experimental support for cross-building R packages with C, C++ and/or Fortran code.
The R installer can now be optionally built to support a single architecture (only 64-bit or only 32-bit).
The default C++ standard has been changed to C++14 where available (which it is on all currently checked platforms): if not (as before) C++11 is used if available otherwise C++ is not supported.
Packages which specify C++11 will still be installed using C++11.
C++14 compilers may give deprecation warnings, most often for ‘std::random_shuffle’ (deprecated in C++14 and removed in C++17). Either specify C++11 (see ‘Writing R Extensions’) or modernize the code and if needed specify C++14. The latter has been supported since R 3.4.0 so the package's ‘DESCRIPTION’ would need to include something like
Depends: R (>= 3.4)
‘R CMD INSTALL’ and ‘R CMD SHLIB’ make use of their flag ‘--use-LTO’ when the ‘LTO_OPT’ make macro is set in file ‘etc/${R_ARCH}/Makeconf’ or in a personal/site ‘Makevars’ file. (For details see ‘Writing R Extensions’ §4.5.)
This provides a valuable check on code consistency. It does work with GCC 8.3 as in Rtools40, but that does not detect everything the CRAN checks with current GCC do.
The default personal library directory on builds with ‘--enable-aqua’ (including CRAN builds) now differs by CPU type, one of
~/Library/R/x86_64/x.y/library ~/Library/R/arm64/x.y/library
This uses the CPU type R (and hence the packages) were built for, so when a ‘x86_64’ build of R is run under Rosetta emulation on an ‘arm64’ Mac, the first is used.
‘R CMD check’ can now scan package functions for bogus ‘return’ statements, which were possibly intended as ‘return()’ calls (wish of PR#17180, patch by Sebastian Meyer). This check can be activated via the new environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_BOGUS_RETURN_’, true for ‘--as-cran’.
‘R CMD build’ omits tarballs and binaries of previous builds from the top-level package directory. (PR#17828, patch by Sebastian Meyer.)
‘R CMD check’ now runs sanity checks on the use of ‘LazyData’, for example that a ‘data’ directory is present and that ‘LazyDataCompression’ is not specified without ‘LazyData’. For packages with large LazyData databases without specifying ‘LazyDataCompression’, there is a reference to the code given in ‘Writing R Extensions’ §1.1.6 to test the choice of compression (as in all the CRAN packages tested a non-default method was preferred).
‘R CMD build’ removes ‘LazyData’ and ‘LazyDataCompression’ fields from the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file of packages without a ‘data’ directory.
The parser now treats ‘\Unnnnnnnn’ escapes larger than the upper limit for Unicode points (‘\U10FFFF’) as an error as they cannot be represented by valid UTF-8.
Where such escapes are used for outputting non-printable (including unassigned) characters, 6 hex digits are used (rather than 8 with leading zeros). For clarity, braces are used, for example ‘\U{0effff}’.
The parser now looks for non-ASCII spaces on Solaris (as previously on most other OSes).
There are warnings (including from the parser) on the use of unpaired surrogate Unicode points such as ‘\uD834’. (These cannot be converted to valid UTF-8.)
Functions ‘nchar()’, ‘tolower()’, ‘toupper()’ and ‘chartr()’ and those using regular expressions have more support for inputs with a marked Latin-1 encoding.
The character-classification functions used (by default) to replace the system ‘iswxxxxx’ functions on Windows, macOS and AIX have been updated to Unicode 13.0.0.
The character-width tables have been updated to include new assignments in Unicode 13.0.0.
The code for evaluating default (extended) regular expressions now uses the same character-classification functions as the rest of R (previously they differed on Windows, macOS and AIX).
There is a build-time option to replace the system's wide-character ‘wctrans’ C function by tables shipped with R: use ‘configure’ option ‘--with-internal-towlower’ or (on Windows) ‘-DUSE_RI18N_CASE’ in ‘CFLAGS’ when building R. This may be needed to allow ‘tolower()’ and ‘toupper()’ to work with Unicode characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane where not supported by system functions (e.g. on Solaris where it is the new default).
R is more careful when truncating UTF-8 and other multi-byte strings that are too long to be printed, passed to the system or libraries or placed into an internal buffer. Truncation will no longer produce incomplete multibyte characters.
Function ‘plclust()’ from the package ‘stats’ and ‘package.dependencies()’, ‘pkgDepends()’, ‘getDepList()’, ‘installFoundDepends()’, and ‘vignetteDepends()’ from package ‘tools’ are defunct.
Defunct functions ‘checkNEWS()’ and ‘readNEWS()’ from package ‘tools’ and ‘CRAN.packages()’ from ‘utils’ have been removed.
‘R CMD config CXXCPP’ is defunct (it was deprecated in R 3.6.2).
‘parallel::detectCores()’ drops support for Irix (retired in 2013).
The ‘LINPACK’ argument to ‘chol.default()’, ‘chol2inv()’, ‘solve.default()’ and ‘svd()’ has been defunct since R 3.1.0. It was silently ignored up to R 4.0.3 but now gives an error.
Subsetting/indexing, such as ‘ddd[*]’ or ‘ddd$x’ on a ‘DOTSXP’ (dot-dot-dot) object ‘ddd’ has been disabled; it worked by accident only and was undocumented.
Many more C-level allocations (mainly by ‘malloc’ and ‘strdup’) are checked for success with suitable alternative actions.
Bug fix for ‘replayPlot()’; this was turning off graphics engine display list recording if a recorded plot was replayed in the same session. The impact of the bug became visible if resize the device after replay OR if attempted another ‘savePlot()’ after replay (empty display list means empty screen on resize or empty saved plot).
‘R CMD check’ etc now warn when a package exports non-existing S4 classes or methods, also in case of no “methods” presence. (Reported by Alex Bertram; reproducible example and patch by Sebastian Meyer in PR#16662.)
‘boxplot()’ now also accepts ‘call’s for labels such as ‘ylab’, the same as ‘plot()’. (Reported by Marius Hofert.)
The help page for ‘xtabs()’ now correctly states that ‘addNA’ is setting ‘na.action = na.pass’ among others. (Reported as PR#17770 by Thomas Soeiro.)
The ‘R CMD check <pkg>’ gives a longer and more comprehensible message when ‘DESCRIPTION’ misses dependencies, e.g., in ‘Imports:’. (Thanks to the contributors of PR#17179.)
‘update.default()’ now calls the generic ‘update()’ on the formula to work correctly for models with extended formulas. (As reported and suggested by Neal Fultz in PR#17865.)
The horizontal position of leaves in a dendrogram is now correct also with ‘center = FALSE’. (PR#14938, patch from Sebastian Meyer.)
‘all.equal.POSIXt()’ no longer warns about and subsequently ignores inconsistent ‘"tzone"’ attributes, but describes the difference in its return value (PR#17277). This check can be disabled _via_ the new argument ‘check.tzone = FALSE’ as suggested by Sebastian Meyer.
‘as.POSIXct()’ now populates the ‘"tzone"’ attribute from its ‘tz’ argument when ‘x’ is a logical vector consisting entirely of ‘NA’ values.
‘x[[2^31]] <- v’ now works. (Thanks to the report and patch by Suharto Anggono in PR#17330.)
In log-scale graphics, ‘axis()’ ticks and label positions are now computed more carefully and symmetrically in their range, typically providing _more_ ticks, fulfilling wishes in PR#17936. The change really corresponds to an improved ‘axisTicks()’ (package ‘grDevices’), potentially influencing ‘grid’ and ‘lattice’, for example.
‘qnorm(<very large negative>, log.p=TRUE)’ is now correct to at least five digits where it was catastrophically wrong, previously.
‘sum(df)’ and similar ‘"Summary"’- and ‘"Math"’-group member functions now work for data frames ‘df’ with ‘logical’ columns, notably also of zero rows. (Reported to R-devel by Martin “b706”.)
‘unsplit()’ had trouble with tibbles due to unsound use of ‘rep(NA, len)’-indexing, which should use ‘NA_integer_’ (Reported to R-devel by Mario Annau.)
‘pnorm(x, log.p = TRUE)’ underflows to ‘-Inf’ slightly later.
‘show(<hidden S4 generic>)’ prints better and without quotes for non-hidden S4 generics.
‘read.table()’ and relatives treated an "NA" column name as missing when ‘check.names = FALSE’ PR#18007.
Parsing strings containing UTF-16 surrogate pairs such as ‘"\uD834\uDD1E"’ works better on some (uncommon) platforms. ‘sprintf("%X", utf8ToInt("\uD834\uDD1E"))’ should now give ‘"1D11E"’ on all platforms.
‘identical(x,y)’ is no longer true for differing ‘DOTSXP’ objects, fixing PR#18032.
‘str()’ now works correctly for DOTSXP and related exotics, even when these are doomed.
Additionally, it no longer fails for ‘list’s with a ‘class’ and “irregular” method definitions such that e.g. ‘lapply(*)’ will necessarily fail, as currently for different ‘igraph’ objects.
Too long lines in environment files (e.g. ‘Renviron’) no longer crash R. This limit has been increased to 100,000 bytes. (PR#18001.)
There is a further workaround for FreeType giving incorrect italic font faces with cairo-based graphics devices on macOS.
‘add_datalist(*, force = TRUE)’ (from package ‘tools’) now actually updates an existing ‘data/datalist’ file for new content. (Thanks to a report and patch by Sebastian Meyer in PR#18048.)
‘cut.Date()’ and ‘cut.POSIXt()’ could produce an empty last interval for ‘breaks = "months"’ or ‘breaks = "years"’. (Reported as PR#18053 by Christopher Carbone.)
Detection of the encoding of ‘regular’ macOS locales such as ‘en_US’ (which is UTF-8) had been broken by a macOS change: fortunately these are now rarely used with ‘en_US.UTF-8’ being preferred.
‘sub()’ and ‘gsub(pattern, repl, x, *)’ now keep attributes of ‘x’ such as ‘names()’ also when ‘pattern’ is ‘NA’ (PR#18079).
Time differences (‘"difftime"’ objects) get a replacement and a ‘rep()’ method to keep ‘"units"’ consistent. (Thanks to a report and patch by Nicolas Bennett in PR#18066.)
The \RdOpts macro, setting defaults for \Sexpr options in an Rd file, had been ineffective since R 2.12.0: it now works again. (Thanks to a report and patch by Sebastian Meyer in PR#18073.)
‘mclapply’ and ‘pvec’ no longer accidentally terminate parallel processes started before by ‘mcparallel’ or related calls in package ‘parallel’ (PR#18078).
‘grep’ and other functions for evaluating (extended) regular expressions handle in Unicode also strings not explicitly flagged UTF-8, but flagged native when running in UTF-8 locale.
Fixed a crash in ‘fifo’ implementation on Windows (PR#18031).
Binary mode in ‘fifo’ on Windows is now properly detected from argument ‘open’ (PR#15600, PR#18031).