The RGCCTUFFI package

Last Release: 0.2-0 (18 Jul 2013)

This package provides a means of

• programmatically reading C code to obtain a description of its routines and data structures, and
• programmatically generating interfaces to the routines and the data structures,
• dynamically invoking any of those routines, accessing global variables, and querying the fields of data structures without having to compile any additional code.

This is an alternative to explicitly writing C/C++ code to interface to existing C/C++ routines and then compiling and loading that compiled code in order to be able to invoke the original compiled routines. The package allows one to do this entirely within R code and within an R session rather than ahead of time.

The use of RGCCTranslationUnit requires that one create the .tu file for the C code before reading the descriptions of that code. In the future, we might use the clang libraries for processing

An entirely different approach is to use Rllvm to compile new native routines to interface to the actual existing routines.

Documentation