[Rd] From .Fortran to .Call?

[Balasubramanian Narasimhan]

To deal with such Fortran issues in several packages I deal with, I 
wrote the SUtools package (https://github.com/bnaras/SUtools) that you 
can try.  The current version generates the registration assuming 
implicit Fortran naming conventions though. (I've been meaning to 
upgrade it to use the gfortran -fc-prototypes-external flag which should 
be easy; I might just finish that during these holidays.)

There's a vignette as well: 
https://bnaras.github.io/SUtools/articles/SUtools.html

-Naras


On 12/19/20 9:53 AM, Ivan Krylov wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Dec 2020 17:04:59 +0000
> "Koenker, Roger W" <rkoenker using illinois.edu> wrote:
>
>> There are comments in various places, including R-extensions §5.4
>> suggesting that .Fortran is (nearly) deprecated and hinting that use
>> of .Call is more efficient and now preferred for packages.
> My understanding of §5.4 and 5.5 is that explicit routine registration
> is what's important for efficiency, and your package already does that
> (i.e. calls R_registerRoutines()). The only two things left to add
> would be types (REALSXP/INTSXP/...) and styles (R_ARG_IN,
> R_ARG_OUT/...) of the arguments of each subroutine.
>
> Switching to .Call makes sense if you want to change the interface of
> your native subroutines to accept arbitrary heavily structured SEXPs
> (and switching to .External could be useful if you wanted to play with
> evaluation of the arguments).
>