R (programming Language) - Milestones

Milestones

The full list of changes is maintained in the NEWS file. Some highlights are listed below.

• Version 0.16 – This is the last alpha version developed primarily by Ihaka and Gentleman. Much of the basic functionality from the "White Book" (see S history) was implemented. The mailing lists commenced on April 1, 1997.
• Version 0.49 – April 23, 1997 – This is the oldest available source release, and compiles on a limited number of Unix-like platforms. CRAN is started on this date, with 3 mirrors that initially hosted 12 packages. Alpha versions of R for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS are made available shortly after this version.
• Version 0.60 – December 5, 1997 – R becomes an official part of the GNU Project. The code is hosted and maintained on CVS.
• Version 1.0.0 – February 29, 2000 – Considered by its developers stable enough for production use.
• Version 1.4.0 – S4 methods are introduced and the first version for Mac OS X is made available soon after.
• Version 2.0.0 – October 4, 2004 – Introduced lazy loading, which enables fast loading of data with minimal expense of system memory.
• Version 2.1.0 – Support for UTF-8 encoding, and the beginnings of internationalization and localization for different languages.
• Version 2.11.0 – April 22, 2010 – Support for Windows 64 bit systems.
• Version 2.13.0 – April 14, 2011 – Adding a new compiler function that allows speeding up functions by converting them to byte-code.
• Version 2.14.0 – October 31, 2011 – Added mandatory namespaces for packages. Added a new parallel package.
• Version 2.15.0 – March 30, 2012 – New load balancing functions. Improved serialization speed for long vectors.