Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.15 on CRAN: New Upstream, Some Maintenance

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.