fidzu : debian

A brand new release 0.1.15 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN.

RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is 'faster than CPU speed' as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.

This version updates to the current 4.2.4 upstream release. It also updates the RcppExports.cpp file with 'glue' between C++ and R. We want move away from using Rf_error() (as Rcpp::stop() is generally preferable). Packages (such as this one) that are declaring an interface have an actual Rf_error() call generated in RcppExports.cpp which can protect which is what current Rcpp code generation does. Long story short, a minor internal reason.

The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.15 (2026-01-14)

• simdjson was upgraded to version 4.2.4 (Dirk in #97

• RcppExports.cpp was regenerated to aid a Rcpp transition

• Standard maintenance updates for continuous integration and URLs

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

14 Jan 2026 4:11pm GMT

An update to the gunsales package is now on CRAN. As in the last update nine years ago (!!), changes are mostly internal. An upcoming dplyr change requires a switch from the old and soon to-be-removed 'underscored' verb form; that was kindly addressed in an incoming pull request. We also updated the CI scripts a few times during this period as needed, and switched to using Authors@R, and refreshed and updated a number of URL references.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

14 Jan 2026 11:21am GMT

I've released version 1.1.24 of plocate, as usual dominated by small patches from external contributors. The changelog is below:

plocate 1.1.24, January 13th, 2026

  - Improve error handling on synchronous reads. Reported by
    Björn Försterling.

  - Remove ConditionACPower=true from the systemd unit file,
    to fix an issue where certain charging patterns prevent
    updatedb from ever running on laptops. Patch by Manfred Schwarb.

  - Add a new option --config-file for changing the path of
    updatedb.conf. Patch by Yehuda Bernáth.

As always, you can get it from the plocate page or your favourite Linux distribution (packages to Debian unstable are on their way up, others will surely follow soon).

13 Jan 2026 10:57pm GMT