[Rd] C macros and Makevars/package building

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

Hi

We are currently embedding a rather large C++ library in R (BioC),  
and we want some comments on the portability of how we have approach  
this.

First of, we are not really able to do much about the portability of  
the basic library, which of course is the main question :) We have an  
approach which seems to work, I just want a bit of feedback on it....

The way we integrate it into R is simply by having a subdirectory  / 
src/sdk together with a Makevars file. This file basically looks like

PKG_CPPFLAGS+=\
   -imacros R_affx_constants.h\
   -Isdk/files\
    (... + a lot of other -I statements telling CPP to include  
subdirectories of src/sdk)

Then we have a

SOURCES.SDK = \
   sdk/files/FileIO.cpp \
   (... + a lot of other .cpp files)
SOURCES.OURS = \
   R_affx_cdf.cpp

and then finally a

OBJS=$(SOURCES.SDK:.cpp=.o) $(SOURCES.OURS:cpp:.o)

We seem to need the last statement since it seems that .cpp is not  
automatically a C++ suffix (but is it done the "right" way for  
portability?). We need the -imacro statement in order to include some  
macros from Rconfig.h (big endian checks) which are then translated  
from the WORDS_BIGENDIAN used in R to the IS_BIG_ENDIAN used in the  
library.

Comments on the portability?

Kasper