Using Sugar for High Level Vector Operations

Romain Francois — written Dec 19, 2012 — source

This example will take a C++ function written using the standard Rcpp API and transform it to something looking much more like it’s R equivilant using Rcpp sugar.

The following function foo transforms two numeric vectors into a third one:

#include <Rcpp.h>
using namespace Rcpp;

// [[Rcpp::export]]
NumericVector foo(NumericVector x, NumericVector y) {
   int n = x.size() ;
   NumericVector res( n ) ;
   double x_ = 0.0, y_ = 0.0 ;
   for( int i=0; i<n; i++) {
      x_ = x[i] ;
      y_ = y[i] ;
      if( x_ < y_ ){
         res[i] = x_ * x_ ;
      } else {
         res[i] = -( y_ * y_) ;
      }
   }
   return res ;
}

While this code is performant, the equivilant R code would be much shorter:

foo <- function(x, y){
   ifelse( x < y, x*x, -(y*y) )
}

Rcpp sugar enables us to write C++ code that operates on entire vectors much like we do in R. Re-writing using the sugar ifelse function and numeric and comparison operators yields the identical one-line implementation:

// [[Rcpp::export]]
NumericVector fooSugar(NumericVector x, NumericVector y) {
   return ifelse( x < y, x*x, -(y*y) );
}

tags: sugar

Extending R with C++ and Fortran — Dirk Eddelbuettel and JBrandon Duck-Mayr
Benchmarking Rcpp code with RcppClock — Zach DeBruine
Simulation Smoother using RcppArmadillo — Tomasz Woźniak

Using Sugar for High Level Vector Operations

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