SWIG and R

R is a GPL'ed open source statistical and plotting environment. Information about R can be found at www.r-project.org.

The R binding are under active development and are extremely experimental. Not all features have been implemented and the API is not stable.

Bugs

Currently the following features are not implemented or broken:

• Garbage collection of created objects
• C Array wrappings
• tested on UNIX only, how well or badly it works on windows is not known

Using R and SWIG

To use R and SWIG in C mode, execute the following commands where example_func.c is the name of the file with the functions in them

swig -r -o example,c example.i
PKG_LIBS="example_func.c" R CMD SHLIB example.c

The corresponding comments for C++ mode are

swig -c++ -r -o example.cpp example.i
PKG_LIBS="example_func.cxx" R CMD SHLIB example.cpp

Note that R is sensitive to the name of the file and to the file extension in C and C++ mode. The name of the wrapper file must be the name of the library. Also in C++ mode, the file extension must be cpp rather than cxx for the R compile command to recognize it.

The commands produce two files. A dynamic shared object file called example.so and an R wrapper file called example_wrap.S. To load these files, start up R and type in the following commands

dyn.load('example.so')
source('example_wrap.R')

You can save an RData file which contains the objects in example file via

save(list=ls(all=TRUE),file="example.RData")

and load them view

load(file="example.RData")
dyn.load('example.so')

General policy

Language conventions

C++ classes

Enumerations