Romain Francois, Professional R Enthusiast

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Sunday, November 28 2010

Rcpp 0.8.9

By romain francois on Sunday, November 28 2010, 18:58 - Rcpp

Rcpp 0.8.9 was pushed to CRAN recently. Apart from minor bug fixes, this release concentrates on modules, with lots of new features to expose C++ functions and classes through R reference classes.

Apollo 17 Command Module

The Rcpp-modules vignette has all the details

The major points are highlighted in the NEWS entry below: 

0.8.9   2010-11-28 (or even -27)

    o   Many improvements were made to in 'Rcpp modules':

        - exposing multiple constructors

        - overloaded methods

        - self-documentation of classes, methods, constructors, fields and 
          functions.

        - new R function "populate" to facilitate working with modules in 
          packages. 

        - formal argument specification of functions.

        - updated support for Rcpp.package.skeleton.

        - constructors can now take many more arguments.
        
    o   The 'Rcpp-modules' vignette was updated as well and describe many
        of the new features

    o   New template class Rcpp::SubMatrix and support syntax in Matrix
        to extract a submatrix: 
        
           NumericMatrix x = ... ;
        
           // extract the first three columns
           SubMatrix y = x( _ , Range(0,2) ) ; 
        
           // extract the first three rows
           SubMatrix y = x( Range(0,2), _ ) ; 
        
           // extract the top 3x3 sub matrix
           SubMatrix y = x( Range(0,2), Range(0,2) ) ; 

    o   Reference Classes no longer require a default constructor for
        subclasses of C++ classes    

    o   Consistently revert to using backticks rather than shell expansion
        to compute library file location when building packages against Rcpp
	on the default platforms; this has been applied to internal test
        packages as well as CRAN/BioC packages using Rcpp

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Tuesday, June 8 2010

Rcpp 0.8.1

By romain francois on Tuesday, June 8 2010, 13:24 - Rcpp

We released Rcpp 0.8.0 almost a month ago. It finalized our efforts in designing a better, faster and more natural API than any version of Rcpp ever before. The journey from Rcpp 0.7.0 to Rcpp 0.8.0 has mainly been a coding and testing effort for designing the API.

And now for something completely different

We have now started (with release 0.8.1 of Rcpp) a new development cycle towards the 0.9.0 version with two major goals in mind

  • We want to improve documentation. To that end Rcpp 0.8.1 includes 4 new vignettes. more on that later.
  • We want to cross the boundaries between R and C++. Rcpp 0.8.1 introduces Rcpp modules. Modules allows the programmer to expose C++ classes and functions at the R level, with great ease.

new vignettes

Rcpp-FAQ :Frequently Asked Questions about Rcpp collects some of the frequently asked questions from the mailing list and from private exchanges with many people.

Rcpp-extending: Extending Rcpp shows how to extend Rcpp converters Rcpp::wrap and Rcpp::as to user defined types (C++ classes defined in someone else's package and third party types (C++ classes defined in some third party library used by a package. The document is based on our experience developping the RcppArmadillo package

Rcpp-package : Writing a package that uses Rcpp highlights the steps involved in making a package that uses Rcpp. The document is based on the Rcpp.package.skeleton function

finally, Rcpp-modules : Exposing C++ functions and classes with Rcpp modules documents the current feature set of Rcpp modules

Rcpp modules

Rcpp modules are inspired from the Boost.Python C++ library. Rcpp modules let you expose C++ classes and functions to the R level with minimal involvment from the programmer

The feature is best described by an example (more examples on the vignette). Say we want to expose this simple class:

This would typically involve external pointers. With Rcpp modules, we can simply declare what we want to expose about this class, and Rcpp takes care of the how to expose it:

The R side consists of grabbing a reference to the module, and just use the World class

The Rcpp-modules vignette gives more details about modules, including how to use them in packages

More details about 0.8.1 release

Here is the complete extract from our NEWS file about this release

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