[R] SWIG for R

Duncan Murdoch dmurdoch at pair.com
Wed Jul 14 18:01:06 CEST 2004


On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 08:01:28 -0700, Duncan Temple Lang
<duncan at wald.ucdavis.edu> wrote :

>SWIG is an extensible system and so people
>other than the SWIG developers can indeed 
>provide facilities for supporting R.
>I am surprised nobody has done it yet
>and remember asking you whether you had considered
>using SWIG for your OpenGL about 3 years ago.

Sorry, I forgot about that.

I don't think SWIG would be much help with OpenGL, because there the
difficulty is in translating the R ideas of what data is like and what
people want to do with it into corresponding concepts in OpenGL, the
actual calls to the OpenGL API are a pretty easy part of the whole
exercise.  In any case, they probably have to be written in compiled
code for performance reasons, since you make so many OpenGL calls 
for every frame being drawn.

But I'm sure there are other libraries where this isn't true, and SWIG
would be useful for them.  Maybe Hisaji has one, and would want to
tackle the R support.

Duncan Murdoch




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