[Rcpp-devel] RInside status

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

David,

On 27 February 2017 at 11:19, David Bellot wrote:
| I would like to know the status of the RInside project. In the Subversion
| repository on R-Forge, the description file says the version is 0.2.10.1 (

We, not unlike many other people, have been a little sloppy in closing the
OLD and ABANDONED svn repository when moving to GitHub.

You should look at CRAN for current and meaningful hints. Start at

    https://cloud.r-project.org/package=RInside      # CDN, mirrored
    https://cran.r-project.org/package=RInside       # Vienna, main host

where the DESCRIPTION file with its BugReports URL points to GitHub:

    R> packageDescription("RInside")[["BugReports"]]
    [1] "https://github.com/eddelbuettel/rinside/issues"
    R> 

It is true that my page at

    http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rinside.html

also points at the SVN (which I'll fix now) but it _also_ contains a more
current ChangeLog subset.

Google points me (even in no-cookie, anon mode) to GitHub too for I search
for 'RInside source code'.  GitHub is second, the SVN in not in the top-ten.

| https://r-forge.r-project.org/scm/viewvc.php/pkg/DESCRIPTION?view=markup&root=
| rinside) and here http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rinside/ the latest version
| is 0.2.11
| But in both cases, the code is at least 3 to 5 years old.

RInside uses Rcpp to talk R, making use of the _embedding API_ of R.

As R is *very* good at maintaining its interfaces, we have not needed many
changes for RInside.  It. Just. Works.

| I would like to use it to embed R in a software I'm writing and give the users
| the possibility to write their "plugins" to my software in R. So far my users
| can use Python to do that (thanks to Boost.Python). The problem is as follow:
| the C++ code will instantiate and call R objects and the R objects should be
| able to access other C++ objects and call C++ functions too. The C++ objects
| cannot be copied to R. In Boost.Python, it happily works, so now I want to add
| support for R too.
| 
| So has this project been abandonned ? Is there anything else than RInside I
| should use ?

It is alive and well.  Just this month I committed a rather nice new
user-contributed example.

| Maybe Rcpp has everything to do that now and RInside is not needed anymore ?

You misunderstand how one embed R. You very much want RInside, and it will
work just fine for your use case -- which is what it was made for.

Cheers, Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org