where is a good tutorial on creating an R package with C++ source code? [closed]

Question

I'm at a loss when I start looking at configure scripts. I'm not sure how to go about creating an R package which has several functions built from C/C++ in such a way that it's portable between Windows & Linux. My attempts to modify the guts of existing packages have been unfruitful.

Any help or links would be greatly appreciated.

Update: If possible I would like to link against: Boost, CUDA, & hwloc

However, I realize that Boost will be a nightmare & hwloc won't be much better. So I'd settle for just CUDA. This was why I dove in the deep end and tried modifying some existing packages to suit my needs (rgl & rglpk). But I'm willing to start out without dependencies and build from the ground up. Thank you everyone for your suggestions!!

Answer 1

I was also quite lost when writing my first package with compiled code. Here are a few tips, but there is probably better material out there.

The main piece about writing R packages is "Writing R extensions". This is a very complete guide, but that also makes it abit hard to read through: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.pdf

Here is a small tutorial I found on google once which I used first, containing how to use C code: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/AlanRPackageTutorial.pdf

Another guide on R packages in general, but not with C code: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Leisch-CreatingPackages.pdf

Rcpp is a very useful package for C++ code, but I haven't used it a lot yet (3 days in fact). It has a lot of documentation in the package itself.