Hi Chris, Thanks for bringing this over here from StackOverflow.
On 11 April 2018 at 17:19, Cris Luengo wrote: | I have some functionality in C++ that I need to access from R. My | impression was that Rcpp was the simplest way to accomplish this, but I | haven't been able to make it work yet. | | The core problem, I think, is that data created is not copyable. One of | these functions returns a `std::unique_ptr` owning the pointer to the | object. Other functions take a reference to the object and modify it or | query it. | | Here is what I've tried so far: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49785379/7328782 | | Ideally, an R variable would hold on to this pointer (with or without the | `std::unique_ptr` around it), and delete the object when it is cleared (or | garbage collected, or whatever R uses). Is this possible? Yes. I have done things like that with eg interfaces to DB engines and alike. One approach is to create a singleton class, and have it shield the std::<unique_ptr>. You can add an init() function that sets things up, possibly with arguments from R (standard string, int, ... whatever is needed). And then add worker functions to set, get, change, ... whatever you need give the pointer. You can add an explicit wind-down too to log, lock, close, ... whatever you have to do with the resource. | The Rcpp-extending vignette says "The macro RCPP_EXPORT_WRAP provides an | easy way to expose a C++ class to R as an external pointer", but looking at | the code it seems to allocate a new object, using `new` and the copy | constructor, and wrap that. Would it be possible to modify the code | generated by this macro to not `new`, but directly use a given pointer? | Would that still allow for lifetime management? Could it be that we are looking at lifetime from opposite sides? The way R thinks about this is that _it_ owns everything, and Rcpp makes getting things back and forth _using the R memory system and its lifetime / reference count control_ fairly easy. It looks like you want to create something that last longer than a single call from R -- and you can, and one way is to provide something outside of R to manage it. Does that make sense? Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org _______________________________________________ Rcpp-devel mailing list Rcpp-devel@lists.r-forge.r-project.org https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rcpp-devel