Example R Package using Zig

This repository is an experiment in using Zig as an alternative to C (or C++) in R packages.

Installation

library(devtools)
install_github("matthewwiese/zig-r-example")

NOTE

If you encounter /bin/bash: zig: command not found when using the installation method above, please read this section.

Unlike R invoked from the terminal, RStudio does not get its PATH information from your shell, but from system-wide settings. Prepend to RStudio's PATH the directory containing your zig executable; use the following command as guidance:

Sys.setenv(PATH=paste("/path/to/zig:", Sys.getenv("PATH"), sep=""))

For more information, see this StackOverflow answer.

Development

Requirements

The Zig code in this package has been tested using release 0.8.1. Make sure you have downloaded Zig and it is available as zig.

I've only tested this on Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) so far; please see the Building section for more information.

Local Install

To package and install locally, run the following commands in your terminal. You must be in the parent directory of wherever you cloned this repo.

R CMD build zig-r-example
R CMD INSTALL zigrexample_0.1.tar.gz

Building

This is where things get... hacky. The "magic" is contained within src/Makevars, which we are using in a very nonstandard way. Eventually, I hope to use zig cc and zig c++ so that heterogenous code is supported without (ideally) any deviation from the normal R package build process.

Since this is still experimental, I'm focusing on refining the ergonomics for my own development environment. Therefore, this package won't work on Windows or macOS yet. However, I see no reason why it shouldn't work on Windows or macOS; submit an issue and we can work on it together!