C Book Club for R Contributors: R’s C interface

Abstract

Reading R’s source code is an extremely powerful technique for improving your programming skills. However, many base R functions, and many functions in older packages, are written in C. It’s useful to be able to figure out how those functions work, so this chapter will introduce you to R’s C API. You’ll need some basic C knowledge, which you can get from a standard C text (e.g., The C Programming Language by Kernigan and Ritchie), or from Rcpp. You’ll need a little patience, but it is possible to read R’s C source code, and you will learn a lot doing it. - Hadley Wickham