[Rcpp-devel] Segfaults

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hi Darren,

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 2:05 AM, Darren Cook <darren at dcook.org> wrote:
> Steve Lianoglou wrote:
>> When I use inline for anything semi-permanent (the last step before
>> turning it into a package, let's say), I typically have a thin R
>> wrapper function that calls down to my inline function and I never
>> call the inline function directly anywhere else. The job of the thin R
>> wrapper function is to sanity check and/or coerce the vars to the
>> correct type before they are past to the inline'd function to avoid
>> the segfault.
> (I've pasted in below an example, from you, from another thread to show
> what you mean.)
>
> Why do you do this in R, instead of in the C++ function?
> (The advantage of doing it in the C++ function is that there is no way
> to accidentally skip the validation.)

Simply because it's less tedious to write in R, so I guess I'm a bit
lazy that way.

I'm a bit more aggressive with my naming though, ie. if I want the
function to be called `func`, the R function `func` is the function
that does the initial type checking/coersion which then calls down to
the inlined Rcpp function, which would would be something like
`.func.cpp`, which is named thusly so that I make sure I never
"forget" that I shouldn't be calling that directly ... still, if my
6-month-later self doesn't figure out that calling `.func.cpp`
directly is verboten, then it's my fault.

I don't disagree, though, doing the argument checking on the C-side of
the code is more robust.

-steve

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact