On 17 January 2011 at 09:13, Patrick Leyshock wrote: | A question, please about development of R packages: | | Are there any guidelines or best practices for deciding when and why to | implement an operation in R, vs. implementing it in C? The "Writing R | Extensions" recommends "working in interpreted R code . . . this is normally | the best option." But we do write C-functions and access them in R - the | question is, when/why is this justified, and when/why is it NOT justified? | | While I have identified helpful documents on R coding standards, I have not | seen notes/discussions on when/why to implement in R, vs. when to implement | in C.
The (still fairly recent) book 'Software for Data Analysis: Programming with R' by John Chambers (Springer, 2008) has a lot to say about this. John also gave a talk in November which stressed 'multilanguage' approaches; see e.g. http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/11/john-chambers-on-r-and-multilingualism.html In short, it all depends, and it is unlikely that you will get a coherent answer that is valid for all circumstances. We all love R for how expressive and powerful it is, yet there are times when something else is called for. Exactly when that time is depends on a great many things and you have not mentioned a single metric in your question. So I'd start with John's book. Hope this helps, Dirk -- Dirk Eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel