Typed-SEXP

Type-safe manipulation of R's SEXP objects without bells and whistles.

Objectives

R internal API is very confusing and not type-safe.

However many times I do not want to pull in huge proc macros just to write my R extension. The main reasons are:

• Macros in general are hard to debug.
• Macros mess up static analysis tools.
• Macros hide the actual code that is being generated.

This library is an attempt to provide a type-safe interface to R's SEXP objects without any user-exposed macros. However it is not a goal to provide a high-level abstractions over R's API like Rcpp or extendr, the most I will do is type-safe indexing, attributes, calling functions, etc. Users are expected to have a general understanding of R internals. Here is a quick tutorial.

Features

• Typed SEXP objects that are ABI-compatible with R's SEXP.
• Type-safe (mutable) indexing of vectors and matrices.
• Typed protection of SEXP objects with a debug mode that sanity-checks the protection order.
• Stack RAII-based auto un-protection of SEXP objects.
• Downcasting of SEXP objects in a method chain with a single call (even if the object is wrapped in another abstraction).
• Namespace and function objects that are environment-aware.
• Call R functions with type-safe arguments and return values.
• (TODO): Dynamically create R functions.

Rust docs

Hosted on docs.rs

Or build locally with:

cargo doc --open

Examples

extension-demo

Located in crates/extension-demo

A demo on writing R-extension with this, include a simple vector addition, matrix multiplication, and calling back a closure passed from R with additional arguments.

embedded-demo

Located in crates/embedded-demo

A demo on embedding R in Rust, and using R from a pure Rust program.

rasm

Joke project and also serves as a testbed for the stability of this library.

Inline assembler for R.

Blog Post

cd crates/rasm

cargo build [--release]

# run demo
# please excuse the crudity of this model. 
# I didn't have time to build it to scale or paint it.
cd demo
Rscript --no-save fork.R
Rscript --no-save sabotage.R