"Official" BARUG Bonus May Meeting

http://www.rstudio.com/images/RStudio.2x.png

Hadley Wickham and J.J. Allaire of RStudio are visiting the Bay Area "for one night only" so we have scheduled a bonus BARUG meeting for May.

Agenda:

6:30 PM Networking and pizza
7:00 Announcements
7:10 Talks begin

Abstracts for Hadley's and J.J.'s talks follow.

# R packages are easy!
Hadley Wickham

R packages have a reputation for being complex unwieldly beasts that
need decades of study to master. In this short talk, I'll show you
that you when you have the right tools, R packages are easy; so easy,
in fact, that they should be your default whenever you combine code,
data or documentation. Packages are great just for yourself, and
they're also great if you want to share. Sharing a package requires a
little more work so that it works everywhere (not just on your
computer), but the right mindset and the right tools make easy and a
small additional time investment makes it possible for you to share
you work with the world through github or CRAN.

# Seamless C++ Integration with Rcpp Attributes
JJ Allaire

Attributes are annotations added to C++ source files to provide
additional information to the compiler . Rcpp Attributes are a new
feature that provides a high-level syntax for declaring C++ functions
as callable from R and automatically generating the code required to
invoke them. The motivation for attributes is several-fold:

• Reduce the learning curve associated with using C++ and R together
• Eliminate boilerplate conversion and marshaling code wherever possible
• Seamless use of C++ within interactive R sessions
• Unified syntax for interactive work and package development

Rcpp supports attributes to indicate that C++ functions should be made
available as R functions, as well as to optionally specify additional
build dependencies. The C++ file can then be interactively sourced
into R using the `sourceCpp` function, which makes all of the exported
C++ functions immediately available to the interactive R session. As a
result of eliminating both configuration and syntactic friction, the
workflow for C++ development in an interactive session now
approximates that of R code: simply write a function and call it.

This talk will cover the motivation for and implementation of
attributes as well as review many practical examples of their use.