On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Michael Banck <[email protected]> wrote:
> ... > > It sounds like rstan is an R wrapper around stan? Then I would assume > it should be possible to build/use rstan without the full stan source > being around. > I believe that's correct. At runtime I think rstan needs stan and its libraries. Hmm, I guess that means it may need the headers at build time. > > Is stan building a shared or static library? Yes. Not sure which. > If not, that may be the > missing link between the two. Requiring the stan source be present when > building rstan (as a seperate source package) will not work or only work > with lots of trouble I do not think is worth it. So if there is no > library being built or other support, combining both into one source > package might be an option. > > One indication this is alright would be that both stan and rstan are > released in lockstep. > My understanding, which may be wrong, is that the stan system includes a "compiler" (stanc) that converts a stan program to C++ and then builds an executable from it. The executable, and maybe stanc, need the stan library to run. I think the rstan R package invokes stanc behind the scenes and builds a library dynamically loadable in R. Or possibly it just runs the compiled stan code. Ross
