I sent this enquiry to r-help and received several sympathetic replies,
none of which were definitive.
It was kindly suggested to me that I might get better mileage out of
r-devel, so I'm trying here. I hope that this is not inappropriate.
My original enquiry to r-help:
==========================================================================
I am working with a function "foo" that explicitly dynamically loads a
shared object library or "DLL", doing something like dyn.load("bar.so").
This is a debugging exercise so I make changes to the underlying
Fortran code (yes, I acknowledge that I am a dinosaur) remake the DLL
"bar.so" and then run foo again. This is all *without* quitting and
restarting R. (I'm going to have to do this a few brazillion times, and
I want the iterations to be as quick as possible.)
This seems to work --- i.e. foo seems to obtain the latest version of
bar.so. But have I just been lucky so far? (I have not experimented
heavily).
Am I running risks of leading myself down the garden path? Are there
Traps for Young (or even Old) Players lurking about?
I would appreciate Wise Counsel.
==========================================================================
One of the replies that I received from r-help indicated that it might
be safer if I were to apply dyn.unload() on each iteration. So I
thought I might put in the line of code
on.exit(dyn.unload("bar.so"))
immediately after my call to dyn.load().
Comments?
Another reply pointed out that "Writing R Extensions" indicates that
there could be problems under Solaris, but does not single out any other
OS for comment. Might I infer that I am "safe" as long as I don't use
Solaris? (Which I certainly *won't* be doing.)
Thanks.
cheers,
Rolf Turner
--
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
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