[Rcpp-devel] A beginners guide to Rcpp

[Hadley Wickham]

> I've printed this out and will sit down with it sometime in the next week.
> One (personal opinion) edit -- the following:
>
> " It is possible to write high performance code in C or Fortran. This
> might produce faster code than C++ (but probably not), but it will
> take you much much longer to write. Without Rcpp, you must sacrifice
> many helpful wrappers and master the complex C internals of R
> yourself. Rcpp is currently the best balance between speed and
> convenience, and any other approach will be much more painful."
>
> should read more like:
>
> " It is possible but painful to write C or Fortran code for use by R.
> Rcpp greatly simplifies this process without sacrificing speed or
> low-level control."

Thanks Christian.  I didn't really like those sentences either.  I've
changed them to:

It is _possible_ to write C or Fortran code for use in R, but it will
be painful; Rcpp provides a clean, approachable API that lets you
write high-performance code, insulated from R's arcane C API.

(Feedback is definitely appreciated, but might be better sent to me
directly instead of to the whole list)

Hadley

-- 
RStudio / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/