A few hours ago Peter Dalgaard (of R Core Team) announced the release of R 3.0.0! Bellow you can read the changes in this release.
One of the features worth noticing is the introduction of long vectors to R 3.0.0. As David Smith recently wrote:
Although many people won’t notice the difference, the introduction of long vectors to R is in fact a significant upgrade, and required a lot of work behind-the-scenes to implement in the core R engine. It will allow data frames to exceed their current 2 billion row limit, and in general allow R to make better use of memory in systems with large amounts of RAM. Many thanks go to the R core team for making this improvement.
You can get the source code from: https://cran.r-project.org/src/
or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you. Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course (which often means it will be within the next 2-48 hours).
If you are running R on Ubuntu, you may wish to consult this post.
If you are running R on Windows, you can use the following code to quickly download and install the latest R version using the installr package:
# installing/loading the package:
if(!require(installr)) {
install.packages("installr"); require(installr)} #load / install+load installr
install.R(to_checkMD5sums = FALSE) # the use of to_checkMD5sums is because of a slight bug in the MD5 file on R 3.0.0. Soon this should get resolved and you could go back to using updateR()
Either way, all users should note that this new release requires that packages will need to be re-installed, which means that after you install the new R, you should run the following command in it:
update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE)
(thank to Prof. Ripley for the above clarification, and the FAQ pointer)
R 3.0.0 NEWS:
SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES
Continue reading “R 3.0.0 is released! (what's new, and how to upgrade)”