Unit testing Rcpp code in a package

Question

I have some C++ code in a package that I want to unit test and I don't want to export to R. I've seen:

Unit tests for code in the /src folder of an R package?

and the code I want to test falls into the second category:

Or you consider your C code to be more standalone, in which case you could use one of a bazillion unit testing frameworks for C.

If one wants to test from C++ (not in using a R framework) what is the best way to setup the test suite? Do you put your C++ tests in tests/ and then have a C++ program with a main somewhere, or do you write a driver function to execute all the C++ tests and then call it from R?

I imagine it is probably a good idea to have the tests be automated by R CMD check as well, which I'm not clear on how to automate using the R package framework.

Answer 1

I do not follow:

• Either it is Rcpp code, but you do not want to expose it to R: The moment you wan to expose it to the (R) unit tests (in the packaging framework) you do though.
• Or it is just a question of picking one of (a great many) C++ unit testing framework like the Boost Test library, or the Google C++ Testing library, or ... --- none of which has been ported to R "as such"

Can you clarify your question a little more?

Maybe you just want to express your C++ code in a way that lets Rcpp call it from only the unit tests so that you get results you can then test via one of popular R unit testing frameworks. In which case the answer may be very similar to what any one of the (currently) 276 Rcpp-using packages on CRAN do as many do in fact use unit tests.