[Rcpp-devel] Some suggestions

[Dominick Samperi]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 4:46 AM, Romain Francois
<romain at r-enthusiasts.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> First of all I'm not sure what all of this buys us, so I'd be somehow
> reluctant to change something that works without understanding what we gain
> and what we lose.
> Why is this important/relevant for you. You say "there are situations where
> it is useful to link directly to Rcpp.dll". Please describe.
>

This is more a matter of completeness than new functionality. Currently if
you use
Rcpp:::LdFlags(static=FALSE) under Windows you will not get the shared
library, so this
option doesn't apply to Windows. WIth the change I suggested you would get
Rcpp/libs/Rcpp.dll in this case. I am not suggesting that the casual user
should use
this option, but at least Rcpp:::LdFlags() does something reasonable when
passed
the FALSE option under Windows.

This is not really that important, but it could be if/when you have many
clients, for the
same reason that having R.dll is important: all clients can link to the same
image (provided
it is not rebased).

BTW, on the Linux side there is double redundancy: not only is there Rcpp.so
and
libRcpp.a (containing the same code), but there is also libRcpp.so, which is
exactly the same as Rcpp.so. Disk space is cheap, but at the rate new
features are being added to Rcpp this may become an issue at some point.

| Also, the dll is built anyway, so your client package is free to link
against it, i.e. we provide |Rcpp:::LdFlags for convenience but if other
packages want to use something else, that's ok too. Why |can't you just
alter you configure/Makevars so that they link against the dll ?

Yes, of course, this can be implemented on the client side, and this leads
to the
second reason for my post. I wanted to raise these issues to give you the
opportunity
to add functionality that properly belongs to Rcpp, and that could conflict
with client
defs if they are added to Rcpp later.


> Also, does#if defined(mingw32) || defined(WIN32)
>
take care of windows 64 ?
>

I think so, unless they add mingw64 and WIN64...

Dominick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/rcpp-devel/attachments/20100710/2480e20e/attachment.htm>