20
R’s C interface
Reading R’s source code is an extremely powerful technique for improving your programming skills. However, many base R functions, and many functions in older packages, are written in C. It’s useful to be able to figure out how those functions work, so this chapter will introduce you to R’s C API. You’ll need some basic C knowledge, which you can get from a standard C text (e.g., The C Programming Language (http://amzn.com/0131101633?tag=devtools-20) by Kernigan and Ritchie), or from Chapter 19. You’ll need a little patience, but it is possible to read R’s C source code, and you will learn a lot doing it.
The contents of this chapter draw heavily from Section 5 (“System and foreign language interfaces”) of Writing R extensions ...
Get Advanced R now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
