Hi all! I have written some code in C for simulating the fate of population using a dll loaded in R. During this simulation the population may go extinct such that the length of its trajectory is unknown beforehand. I wonder there is a way to define the size of the result in C and make it known to R to get the vector appropriately. I have defined the output size very much larger than necessary to hold the result and then shrink the vector to the size where meaningful values occur, but this waste much resources and time unnecessarily. The C code #include <stdlib.h> #include <math.h> double min(double a, double b) { if(a>b) return b; else return a; } double unirand() { return (rand()+1.0)/(RAND_MAX+1.0); } void RndSBDdemography(double *b, double *d, double *a, double *c, double *No, double *tmax, double *tiempo, double *Nind) { double tb, td, n; int bc=0; tiempo[0]=1.0; Nind[0] = *No; // This loop generates output of variable and a priori unknown size while (Nind[bc] >= 2 && tiempo[bc] <= *tmax) { bc = bc + 1; tb = -(1 / (*b - *a * Nind[bc-1])) * log(unirand()); td = -(1 / (*d + *c * Nind[bc-1])) * log(unirand()); tiempo[bc]= tiempo[bc-1] + min(tb, td)/ Nind[bc-1]; if (tb < td) n=1.0 ; else n= -1.0; Nind[bc] = Nind[bc-1] + n; } } The definition of the function call in R RndSBDdemography = function(b=b,d=d,a=a,c=c, No=No, tmax=tmax){ tiempo=numeric(100000); Nind=numeric(100000); out=.C("RndSBDdemography", b=as.double(b), d=as.double(d), a=as.double(a), c=as.double(c), No=as.double(No), tmax=as.double(tmax), tiempo=as.double(tiempo), Nind=as.double(Nind) ) # trim the output to a size where meaningful values occur indi=which(out$tiempo!=0) return(data.frame(tiempo=out$tiempo[indi], Nind=out$Nind[indi])) } Hope someone can give a hint on this. Best Regards Marcelo Kittlein