Rcpp tutorial

Tutorial: C++ and Rcpp for beginners

Romain Francois and Hadley Wickham, Rice University

Overview

This tutorial will provide a quick introduction to fundamental concepts of C++ and teach an easy way to connect R and C++ with Rcpp. You will learn how to:

Write fast C++ code to speed up slow R functions.
Easily embed C++ code with sourceCpp and cppFunction
Learn how to manipulate R data structures using C++ classes from the Rcpp API like NumericVector, IntegerVector, CharacterVector, and List, ...
Use C++ scalar types: int, double, String, to avoid the overhead associated with R’s length one vectors

This tutorial will be interactive: you will have plenty of opportunities to practice what you learn by writing Rcpp code

Prerequisites

You should be comfortable writing functions in R; no prior C or C++ knowledge is needed. (If you’re a C++ expert this course will probably be too basic for you)

Equipment

You’ll need a laptop that can build R packages. That means on Windows, the Rtools needs to be present and working, on OS X the Xcode package should be installed, and on Linux things just generally just work. You can check that your set up works by running

library(Rcpp)
cppEval(’1 + 1’)

We’ll be available before the class to help you troubleshoot if you can’t get this to work.

Tutorial: C++ and Rcpp for beginners

Overview

Prerequisites

Equipment

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