[Rcpp-devel] devtools load_all() and modules

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 21 March 2012 at 08:49, Hadley Wickham wrote:
| > Sure, very valid question.  I tend to do two things:
| >
| >  a) at times experiment/try/play with the inline package and cxxfunction
| >
| >  b) much more often, work with a package where, for force of habit, my
| >    typical workflow often is
| >
| >        $ R CMD INSTALL mypkg && r -lmypkg -e 'someFunctionToTickle(3.14)'
| >
| >    which does a 'library(mypkg)' for me (which is how r resolves the -l
| >    arguments) and then executes the R expression
| >
| > as I never got really happy with any of the unloading attempts. Littler's r
| > starts very quickly and gives me a guaranteed clean slate, so I tend to work
| > from there.
| 
| Hmmmm, interesting.  But R CMD install is still fairly slow, right?  I
| guess because you're installing directly from the package dir (and not
| from a tarball built via R CMD build) it's a bit faster, and only
| changed files need to be recompiled.  You introduce a slight risk of

Plus I call 'g++' et al as 'ccache g++' so it's all cached in case of no
changes, thanks to the amazing compiler caching package ccache (which is
pretty standard on Linux).  

And you can tell R CMD INSTALL to skip steps like vignettes, tests, cleanup,
... to just load the R and C++ code.

| problems caused by build artefacts left by previous runs, but that's
| probably worth it for the speed (and you know much more about the
| tradeoffs here than I do).

Dunno. I just /like/ to know I work with real fresh R sessions without
side-effects from anything lingering --- with the whole .onLoad, .onAttach,
import from Namespace, ... soup lingering, this gives me some clarity.

But "there is more than one way to do it" as they say...

Dirk

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