R help - Nov 2001 - dyn.load'ing dll's created by Scompile causes R to crash

Dear all,

I have used the Scompile package (by Mathhew Calder) on previous releases of
R (on Windows), and it has worked well. However, R.1.3.1 crashes when
dyn.load'ing C-functions created by Scompile.
>From the last R-newsletter it seems that there has been some changes to how
external routines are being included in version 1.3.1. I won't claim to
understand the details, but I was wondering whether these changes are the
source of my problem? If so, I would like to know if there is a way of
"getting back" to the old way of doing things such that Scompile can
still
be used?

(For those who don't know Scompile, it is a package which takes an R/Splus
function and converts it into C-code. This is subsequently compiled and
loaded into R/Splus. The homepage of Scompile is
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/mncalder/scompile/scompile.html
It seems that no development has taken place on this package for several
years.)

Thanks in advance

S?ren H?jsgaard
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On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, [iso-8859-1] Søren Højsgaard wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I have used the Scompile package (by Mathhew Calder) on previous releases
of
> R (on Windows), and it has worked well. However, R.1.3.1 crashes when
> dyn.load'ing C-functions created by Scompile.
>
> From the last R-newsletter it seems that there has been some changes to how
> external routines are being included in version 1.3.1. I won't claim to
> understand the details, but I was wondering whether these changes are the
> source of my problem? If so, I would like to know if there is a way of
> "getting back" to the old way of doing things such that Scompile
can still
> be used?
The old way is still the default. Duncan Temple Lang's article describes
an optional new way.

Looking at the CHANGES file for R 1.3.1 under Windows, the recommended
compiler system has been changed. Possibly the new system isn't
quite compatible with lcc, though DLLs should be fairly standard.
Unfortunately I think debugging under Windows is tricky.

A long-term fix would be to patch Scompile so that it uses Rcmd SHLIB to
compile things.  This would mean that the recommended compilers for R
could always be used in compiling. The patch to Scompile would be fairly
easy, but it would also mean downloading Perl, gcc and the other things
needed to compile R. I did something like this a few years ago to get
Scompile to work with R on Solaris (probably about R 0.50), but I
didn't find it useful enough to keep updated.


	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Asst. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle

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