[Rcpp-devel] Rf_error and Rcpp

[Douglas Bates]

After following some of the discussion in that thread I was going to
ask exactly the question that you just answered.

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 2:35 AM, Romain Francois
<romain at r-enthusiasts.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> One crucial nugget of information from somewhere in this R-devel thread:
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.devel/24284
>
> When using c++ --- and therefore Rcpp --- it is not safe to call Rf_error to
> stop the c function because error seems to bypass c++ unwinding and might
> leave c++ in an inconsistent state where objects are not properly deleted,
> etc ...
>
> Therefore the recommendation I would promote is to :
> - wrap each function by BEGIN_RCPP and END_RCPP (which will arrive with
> 0.8.0)
> - use exceptions instead of errors
>
> Something like this:
>
> SEXP foobar( SEXP x_, SEXP y_){
>        BEGIN_RCPP
>        std::vector<int> z(3);
>        int x = Rcpp::as<int>(x_) ;
>        double y = Rcpp::as<double>(y_) ;
>        if( x < 0 ) throw std::range_error("no good");
>        END_RCPP
>        return Rcpp::wrap( 3 ) ;
> }
>
> This can be facilitated by the new RCPP_* macros:
>
> RCPP_FUNCTION_2( int, foobar, int x, double y){
>        std::vector<int> z(3) ;
>        if( x < 0 ) throw std::range_error("no good");
>        return 3 ;
> }
>
> because this exit the flow through c++ exceptions, this will properly unwind
> the stack and therefore deal with z. From what I understand of Simon's
> emails in R-devel, using Rf_error here instead of throw would not delete z.
>
> I'm sending this here because I seem to recall people mixing C++ and error
> (no documentation says one should not anyway) but I don't remember where
> (maybe minqa or lme4a).

Both, it turns out.  I will provide a new version of minqa when Rcpp
0.8.0 is released (so that I can list a dependency on Rcpp (>=0.8.0)).
 Meanwhile I will revise the code in lme4a, which is a development
version and never formally released.

As I understand it, we are still at risk of code in the R API that we
call in turn calling Rf_error, right?  That will have the same effect
of leaving the C++ exception stack in an inconsistent state?