On Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 19:56:38 UTC, data pulverizer wrote:
I'd encourage you to approach this however you like, but for the
sake of anyone else reading this, I want to correct a few points.
I'm guessing you haven't spent any time understanding embedrv2.
Regarding your `R.lib` file (embedrv2 and the previous
version), I thought it might have something to do with Weka,
the machine learning library - I got my wires crossed there.
Perhaps I was reading something to do with the ML library
before/while I was reading your repo. My point still stands
though. I've never worked anywhere that would allow a developer
to install unverified pre-compiled code from an online repo. It
would pose too much of a security issue.
That's not "unverified pre-compiled code". As I said, it's an
import library for Windows, from an attempt long ago to call R
from D on Windows. You don't call the .dll file directly on
Windows, you call the .lib file. It's the same thing you do with
OpenBLAS and many other popular libraries.
As I explained my approach is to mirror the 'design language'
of Rcpp/RInside/cpp11 libraries, because its a great approach,
I'm familiar with it, and so are many others. A user (including
myself) will be sensitive to on-boarding and usage friction, so
I my library will present a clear, familiar, and easy to use
interface.
I'm familiar with Rcpp/RInside/cpp11. If you go to the CRAN page
for RInside, you'll see I'm one of the authors. If you check out
Dirk's 2013 book, you'll see that one of the sections in it was
based on an example I gave him. I haven't done much with cpp11,
but that's because I was already using D before it existed.
embedrv2 does exactly the same thing. You write your D function
and metaprogramming is used to create a wrapper that you can call
from R without further modification.
I didn't know about your betterr R package. I think it is a
different approach from the one I would take. I think both Rcpp
and in particular cpp11 have very good design approaches and
continuous improvements to their design that gives me plenty to
think about. They are at the cutting edge and are pushing the
boundaries, and I think it would be cool to show that D can
play in the same space with ease, finesse, and style.
Since you've clearly never used it and don't know how it works,
why are you trashing it? I'll let anyone else judge how awkward,
complicated and lacking in style it is. Here's the example from
the landing page:
```
void main() {
// Initialization
startR();
// Generate 100 draws from a N(0.5, sd=0.1) distribution
Vector x = rnorm(100, 0.5, 0.1);
// Create a 3x2 matrix and fill the columns
auto m = Matrix(3,2);
Column(m,0) = [1.1, 2.2, 3.3];
Column(m,1) = [4.4, 5.5, 6.6];
// Calculate the inverse of the transpose
auto m2 = solve(t(m));
// Modify the second and third elements of the first column of m
m[1..$,0] = [7.7, 8.8];
// Choose x and y to minimize x^2 + y^2
// Use Nelder-Mead with initial guesses 3.5 and -5.5
auto nm = NelderMead(&f);
OptimSolution sol = nm.solve([3.5, -5.5]);
// Clean up
closeR();
}
extern(C) {
double f(int n, double * par, void * ex) {
return par[0]*par[0] + par[1]*par[1];
}
}
```
That's ten lines of code to generate a vector of random numbers,
create and fill a matrix, take the inverse of the transpose of
the matrix, mutate the matrix, and solve a nonlinear optimization
problem.
I don't care that you're not using it. Have fun creating your own
project. That doesn't excuse writing falsehoods about the work
I've done.
