omegahat/RGCCTranslationUnit: R interface to GCC source code information

This package provides rich facilities for extracting meta-data about C/C++ code to get a description of variables, routines, data structures, classes and methods. We use these to programmatically explore and summarize native code and importantly, to generate R bindings to it (or for other languages). This differs from SWIG in that a) it makes the information available to R programmers directly and so the analysis of the code and binding generation can be done entirely within R, and b) it provides more information than SWIG does, e.g. allowing us to examine the bodies of routines/methods and so compute call graphs, analyze the use of global variables. This holds some promise for helping to automate the conversion of C code in R packages to thread-safe code for use with in-process concurrent threads, and general refactoring.

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("omegahat/RGCCTranslationUnit")