R devel - May 2022 - How to access to internal header files

>>>>> Sebastian Fischer 
>>>>>     on Tue, 24 May 2022 09:01:17 +0200 writes:
    > Dear R-devel Mailing List,

    > I would like to get a better understanding of R's internal
structures by
    > using R's
    > C API. For that I would like to have access to all the C header files 
    > that are listed
    > here: https://github.com/wch/r-source/tree/trunk/src/include. (i.e. I 
    > want to e.g.
    > #include <Defn.h>

    > However when I install R, there is only a subset of those header files 
    > available on my system. 

Of course, very much on purpose.
Headers such as Defn.h are *not* part of the API and hence
should not be visible.

    > While I am aware that files like Defn.h are not intended  to be used by
    > R Extensions, I assume there must be some way to configure R's 
    > compilation to make
    > these definitions available for my exploration of the language.

Well, if you want to explore how R is written ... and that's the
only good reason for looking into such private header files ...
then get the sources of R and explore...

The official sources (and even daily snapshots from both
"R-patched" and "R-devel")  are available e.g. from

 https://cran.r-project.org/sources.html


    > I would appreciate any help.

    > Best regards

    > Sebastian Fischer

    > ______________________________________________
    > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
    > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

On 24 May 2022 at 15:23, Martin Maechler wrote:
| Well, if you want to explore how R is written ... and that's the
| only good reason for looking into such private header files ...
| then get the sources of R and explore...
| 
| The official sources (and even daily snapshots from both
| "R-patched" and "R-devel")  are available e.g. from
| 
|  https://cran.r-project.org/sources.html

And for those who prefer the GitHub interface (including reasonably powerful
searches, now even via two APIs, as well as editor support) there are the
mirrors of the svn repo at GitHub of which

   https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn

is the more recent variant with extra polish to better map original commits
to a nicely browseable git commit history.  It also has all the branches.

I still keep an svn checkout for local builds of r-devel as I have since
'forever' but find the github access extremely valuable for browsing.

So a cheers for Jeroen for taking care of this.

Dirk

-- 
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org