C++ for R Users
Motivation
This is a collection of how I solved different C++ errors. Some of this required to check multiple sources and spend hours looking for online resources.
In particular, these notes follow the clas ECE244 (Programming Fundamentals) at the University of Toronto taught by Professor Salma Emara.
Honest Disclaimer
These notes are a summary of what worked after hours of fails for my future self. I hope it helps you too.
I am a Statistician and Political Scientist, not a Computer Scientist!
Rationale
These notes use the cpp11 package (Vaughan, Hester, and François 2024). This package is a modern C++ interface for R. It is a header-only library that allows you to write C++ code in R packages. All the examples in these notes use the cpp11 package.
Rcpp is another popular package for writing C++ code in R (Eddelbuettel et al. 2024). However, I will only cover some differences in the syntax between the two packages by the end of the notes.
Organization
Chapter 1 is about how to compile and run a C++ and how to test if R detects the compiler.
Chapters 2 to 7 provide different examples of C++ functions. These are organized into an R package, ece244, that also contains equivalent R functions for comparison. The goal of these chapters is to show the different syntax, compare the performance of the two languages, and show how to use C++ in R packages.
The ece244 package can be installed from GitHub with:
remotes::install_github("pachadotdev/cpp11-r-examples", subdir = "ece244")Chapter 8 is about how tocreate R packages that use C++ code.
Chapter 9 covers some differences between cpp and Rcpp.