[Rcpp-devel] A beginners guide to Rcpp

[Hadley Wickham]

> Nice document but it would be good to distinguish between the C
> interfaces -- the .C interface may not be fully general; however, it
> is adequate for a lot of numerical work such as writing the objective
> function and gradient in optimization routines and is not painful at
> all.

I guess my argument would be that if you know Rcpp, you don't need to
know the C interface. If you know the C interface, you're still better
off learning Rcpp if you want to tackle anything more complicated.

i.e. if you only have the time to learn one of Rcpp, .C, or .Call,
you're better off learning Rcpp.
 That's not to say .C or .Call are not useful to know, but they're
probably not that useful to learn unless you already known how to
program in C.  If you don't know how to program in C++, it's still
worthwhile to learn Rcpp.

Hadley

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