[Rd] Demo for linking native routines between R packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Jitao,

Thanks for writing this up.

You could add a section on 'prior art' and references.  The canonical example
always was (c.f. Writing R Extensions)

  lme4 <-> Matrix

which was followed early by the CRAN packages

  zoo <-> xts
  
upon which I built

  xts <-> RcppXts
  
with a write-up (from 2013 !!) here: https://gallery.rcpp.org/articles/accessing-xts-api/

Via private mail, I helped then-maintainer Vincent connect expm:

  expm <-> Matrix

and built two packages on CRAN _for the very purpose of exporting API
functions to be called_ (which in both cases are from base R as R Core is
very careful not get tied into exporting APIs, which is both understandable
and a source of added difficulty for us package writers)

  RApiDatetime
  RApiSerialize

The latter one is use by my RcppRedis package, Travers' very nice qs package
and Tim's rpg package.

To my reading, the R Community is drifting more and more towards collective
amnesia where prior work is (pick any one the following)

 - ignored altogether
 - reinvented by another package
 - shadowed by another package
 
rather than extended, improved and/or cited.  That is a collective loss for
all of us. It would be nice if you could stear back a little and reference
prior related work. My apologies to other packages in this area I have not
listed. We really should have a common reference for this.

Cheers, Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org