[Rcpp-devel] Exposing a large number of C++ classes in R

[Rich FitzJohn]

Hi Holger,

The yaml should be easy enough to generate (if you can create a list then
yaml::as.yaml will dump out suitable yaml probably).  While yaml is used
for the configuration now, it's not essential to how the package works.

I did look into generating the interface from something like roxygen
comments -
  https://github.com/richfitz/RcppR6/issues/1
I think with the same reading list as Whit suggested.  There are some
starts there that I haven't looked at in a long time, mostly in this repo:
  https://github.com/richfitz/cppinfo

In the end it was not too unpleasant just to write the yaml out so I gave
up on it.  If you have a lot of classes though, there is a lot of yaml -
this was from the project that motivated the package.
  https://github.com/traitecoevo/plant/blob/master/inst/RcppR6_classes.yml
With a decent access to something that can parse C++ you could get at a lot
of the type information, but it's a lot of work and corner cases,
especially once you deal with templated classes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cheers,
Rich


On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 1:44 PM Whit Armstrong <armstrong.whit at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I've been thinking for a while about using clang to do source-to-source
> translation to generate the R bindings for a given c++ class.
>
> There are lots of examples online, but I haven't yet tackled this for R.
>
>
> http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/06/08/basic-source-to-source-transformation-with-clang
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28711580/how-to-write-a-source-to-source-compiler-api
> http://szelei.me/code-generator/
> etc.
>
> good luck!
>
> -Whit
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 7:58 AM, Holger Hoefling <hhoeflin at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am trying to write a package that exposes a large number of C++ classes
>> from an external project to R and was looking into how to lighten the
>> workload. Dirk already pointed my to the RcppR6 package, which looks really
>> useful.
>>
>> However, even this would require to write quite a bit of yaml to achieve
>> this. So, is there a converter (e.g. based on doxygen xml) that can help
>> with the yaml writing?
>>
>> Does anyone have more experience and can give pointers on how to best
>> approach this problem?
>>
>> Also, how best to handle multiple inheritance in this context?
>>
>> Thanks a lot for anyone's help!
>>
>> Holger
>>
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>
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