nanotime 0.3.14 on CRAN: Upstream Maintenance

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:34:00 CDT

Another minor update 0.3.14 for our nanotime package is now on CRAN, and has compiled for r2u (and will have to wait to be uploaded to Debian until dependency bit64 has been updated there). nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, using the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations.

This release has been driven almost entirely by Michael, who took over as bit64 maintainer and has been making changes there that have an effect on us ‘downstream’. He reached out with a number of PRs which (following occassional refinement and smoothing) have all been integrated. There are no user-facing changes, or behavioural changes or enhancements, in this release.

The NEWS snippet below has the fuller details.

Changes in version 0.3.14 (2026-04-22)

Tests were refactored to use NA_integer64_ (Michael Chirico in #149 and Dirk in #156)

nanoduration was updated for changes in nanotime 4.8.0 (Michael Chirico in #152 fixing #151)

Use of as.integer64(keep.names=TRUE) has been refactored (Michael Chirico in #154 fixing #153)

In tests, nanotime is attached after bit64; this still needs a better fix (Michael Chirico in #155)

The package now has a hard dependency on the just released bit64 version 4.8.0 (or later)

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository – and all documentation is provided at the nanotime documentation site.

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. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.