useR! 2020 Tutorial: Seamless R and C++ Integration with Rcpp

The RLadies chapters and the R User Group from Chile are very happy to announce that we will be hosting one of the useR! 2020 online tutorials (https://user2020.r-project.org/program/tutorials/). We will have the honor of having Dirk Eddelbuettel in our meetup, who will be running the tutorial: "Seamless R and C++ Integration with Rcpp" on July 14th, 15:00 UTC.

• Background

R has risen to become the lingua franca of statistical research and applications. At the same time, user demands on computing resources and performance have also increased. This is driven chiefly by the ever-growing size of datasets, and may sometimes be coupled with increases in their complexity. The quest for computing with larger datasets, as well as the ever-present desire to also compute "faster" make complementing the interpreted language-processing at the core of R with native code extensions a natural next step. The Rcpp package has become the principal venue for extending R with compiled code. It makes it easy to extend R with C or C++ spanning the range from simple one-liners to larger routines and bindings of entire external libraries.

• Workshop contents

We will motivate and introduce Rcpp as a natural extension to R that provides an easy-to-use and powerful interface. Helper functions and tools including RStudio will be used to easy creation of R extensions. Several examples will introduce basic use cases including writing code with RcppArmadillo which is the most widely-used package on top of Rcpp.

• Target Audience

R users wanting to go beyond R. Prior experience with compiled languages like C and C++ is helpful but not required.

• About the instructor

Dr Dirk Eddelbuettel has been a (co-)author and maintainer for the Rcpp project since its inception. He works as a senior "quant" in industry combining C++ and R for high-frequency data analysis and predictive models in finance, and teaches a class on Data Science Programming Methods as a Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author, co-author, or maintainer of sixty CRAN packages, an elected board member of the R Foundation, and a 25+ year contributor to Debian looking after 150+ packages including R.

• Attending the workshop

Please, read carefully the useR! 2020 Code of Conduct: https://user2020.r-project.org/codeofconduct/. All participants are required to agree to it.

The tutorial will start at 15:OO UTC and has a duration of two hours (+ a 10 minutes break). Check your timezone here: https://arewemeetingyet.com/UTC/2020-07-14/15:00/Seamless%20R%20and%20C%2B%2B%20integration%20with%20Rcpp

[UPDATED SECTION]

We'll be hosting the tutorial on Zoom. The link will be shared in the comments of this event half an hour in advanced. The meeting has a waiting room. We'll let everyone in at 15:00 UTC.

For the tutorial you'll need to install Rcpp from CRAN. You will also need a compiler. Please read sections 1.2 and 1.3 on the second page of the Rcpp FAQ to check specific recommendations for Windows/OSX/Linux users: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rcpp/vignettes/Rcpp-FAQ.pdf
We'll be using RStudio. Is not a bad idea to have an rstudio.cloud account as back-up.