Ten years ago today I wrote the NEWS.Rd entry in this screenshot for the very first Rcpp_release:
So Happy Tenth Birthday, Rcpp !! It has been quite a ride. Nearly 1500 packages on CRAN, or about one in nine (!!), rely on Rcpp to marshall data between R and C++, and to extend R with performant C++ code.
Rcpp would not exist without Dominick Samperi who recognised early just how well C++ template classes could fit the task of seamlessly interchanging data between the two systems, and contributed the first versions to my RQuantLib package. After a few versions he left this and R around 2006. About two years later, as I needed this for what I was working on, I rejuvenated things with the initial “second wave” release whose 10th birthday we celebrate today.
In late 2009 Romain François joined, intially contacted because of the needs of RProtoBuf for some Java tooling. (As an aside, there is a neat story of the very first steps of RProtoBuf here.) And from late 2009 to some time in 2013 or so Romain pushed Rcpp incredibly hard, far and well. We all still benefit from the work he did, and probably will for some time.
These days Rcpp is driven by a small and dedicated core team: JJ Allaire, Kevin Ushey, Qiang Kou, Nathan Russell, Doug Bates, John Chambers and myself – plus countless contributors and even more users via GitHub and the mailing list. Thanks to all for making something excellent together!
And because ten is written as one-oh, I felt the time was right to go to the big one oh release and just committed this:
I will probably wrap this up as a release in a day or two and sent it to CRAN where it may remain for a few days of testing and checking. If you want it sooner, try the GitHub repo or the Rcpp drat repo where I will push the release once completed.
Again, a very big cheers and heartfelt Thank You! to everybody who helped on this ten year journey of making Rcpp what it is today.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
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