Rcpp modules just got more flexible (as of revision 3838 of Rcpp, to become 0.9.16 in the future).

modules have allowed exposing C++ classes for some time now, but developpers had to declare custom wrap and as specializations if they wanted their classes to be used as return type or argument type of a C++ function or method. This led to writing boilerplate code. The newest devel version allows for syntax like this:

The only thing the developper has to do is to declare the class using the macro RCPP_EXPOSED_CLASS. This will declare the appropriate class traits that Rcpp is using for internal implementations of as and wrap

One the example we can see three examples of the new functionality:

  • make_foo : this returns a Foo
  • cloner: this returns a Foo*
  • bla: uses a const Foo& as argument