BH 1.90.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 10:03:00 CDT

Boost is a very large and comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming language, containing well over one hundred individual libraries. The BH package provides a sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking required) use by R. It is fairly widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud mirrors) show over 41.5 million package downloads.

Version 1.90.0 of Boost was released a few days ago following the regular Boost release schedule of April, August and December releases. As before, we packaged it almost immediately and started testing following our annual update cycle which strives to balance being close enough to upstream and not stressing CRAN and the user base too much. The reverse depends check revealed only one really minor issue among the over three hundred direct reverse dependencies. And that issue was addressed yesterday within hours by a truly responsove maintainer (and it helped that a related issue had been addressed months earlier with version 1.89.). So big thanks to Jean-Romain Roussel for the prompt fix, and to Andrew Johnson for the earlier test with 1.89.0.

As last year with 1.87.0, no new Boost libraries were added to BH so the (considerable) size is more or less unchanged. It lead to CRAN doing a manual inspection but as there were no other issues it sailed through as is now in the CRAN repository.

The short NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 1.90.0-1 (2025-12-13)

Upgrade to Boost 1.90.0, patched as usual to comment-out diagnostic suppression messages per the request of CRAN

Minor upgrades to continuous integration

Via my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to the previous release. Comments and suggestions about BH are welcome via 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.