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A general description is here.
Performance of ‘package_dependencies()’ has been improved for cases when the number of dependencies is large.
Strings newly created by ‘gsub()’, ‘sub()’ and ‘strsplit()’, when any of the inputs is marked as ‘"bytes"’, are also marked as ‘"bytes"’. This reduces the risk of creating invalid strings and accidental substitution of bytes deemed invalid.
Support for ‘readLines(encoding="bytes")’ has been added to allow processing special text files byte-by-byte, without creating invalid strings.
‘iconv(from="")’ now takes into account any declared encoding of the input elements and uses it in preference to the native encoding. This reduces the risk of accidental creation of invalid strings, particularly when different elements of the input have different encoding (including ‘"bytes"’).
Files can now be extracted even from very large zip archives (PR#18390, thanks to Martin Jakt).