[Rcpp-devel] RFC: Rcpp modules vs. RefClass

[Christian Gunning]

All,
Thanks for the comments, much appreciated.
To summarize what I'm hearing:

A) No major problems with the described approach
B) Not much evidence for previous use of this approach

On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Kevin Ushey <kevinushey at gmail.com> wrote:

> To be brief -- Rcpp modules are effectively in maintenance mode at this
> point; we don't plan to extend / improve modules beyond resolving issues if
> and when they come up.
>

Thanks, that answers one big question.


> We did get to the bottom of the posted issue
>

Yes, I realize that.  My point was that PR 454 remains un-merged, meaning
that the last attempted modules code work was ultimately unfruitful. It can
be challenging for end-users to distinguish between projects / code that is
"fully functional but no longer under active development" (ok) from
directions that code that is "unofficially deprecated".


> I'm not quite sure what the parallel between reference classes and modules
> are here
>

For a *user*, the resulting behavior is very similar.

One big point is Rcpp's by-reference semantics, which has caused perennial
confusion for users coming from a purely R background.  Of course,
by-reference semantics of Rcpp provides a big potential speed-up, but
yields R functions that commonly confuse new users. And yes, both Rcpp
functions and RefClasses are *labeled* with strongly worded warnings.
Still, RefClasses introduce novel R style & semantics. I strongly suspect
users are less likely to be surprised when "the_obj" is modified in-place
by a call to "the_obj$rcpp_add(1)" [RefClass, Rcpp modules]  versus
"rcpp_add(the_obj, 1)" [Rcpp attributes, non-const args].


>
> In sum, I think Rcpp modules are more geared towards developers who are
> primarily C++ programmers who just want a super-simple way to expose a C++
> class to R;
>

As a point of reference, I *literally* learned Cpp OO to use Rcpp modules
(thanks Romain!). This was quite a while ago, and I don't think Rcpp
attributes were around yet. Also, R RefClasses were still new, and no one
was talking about them. I really *liked* the Rcpp modules interface, but I
still don't really understand it. As far as I can tell, the approach I
describe here allows me to achieve the same end-goal as Rcpp modules with a
similar amount of effort using tools under active development.

The broader question of "best practices" remains - the Rcpp docs have
expanded considerably over the years (it even has a book!). A number of
great vignettes describing many "best practices" - in particular, I found a
recent re-read of the attributes vignette to be *very* helpful. I didn't
see much discussion of my particular question of how best to fit these
parts together. If I'm the only one interested in this, so be it :)

best,
Christian

-- 
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal – Panama!
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