2 min read

Using Eclipse CDT to develop Rcpp Package

2013-01-29

Rstudio is great, but it lacks some useful features for C/C++ provided by modern IDE such as tracing. Eclipse CDT is a good choice, but it is complicated to setup the project correctly.

I just wrote a cmake script to generate Eclipse CDT project for developing Rcpp package.

Environment

  • CMake >= 2.8.7
  • Eclipse >= 3.7
  • Eclipse CDT >= 1.4.2
  • R >= 2.15
  • Rcpp >= 0.10

Configuration

  • Download FindLibR.cmake from github provided by Rstudio

  • Generate Rcpp package, for example

library(Rcpp)
Rcpp.package.skeleton("RcppPackage")
  • Put the following file, named CMakeLists.txt in the generated folder such as RcppPackage in the previous example

cmake CMakeLists.txt cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8) project(RcppPackage) find_package(LibR) if(${LIBR_FOUND}) else() message(FATAL_ERROR "No R...") endif() message(STATUS ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}) execute_process( COMMAND ${LIBR_EXECUTABLE} "--slave" "-e" "stopifnot(require('Rcpp'));cat(Rcpp:::Rcpp.system.file('include'))" OUTPUT_VARIABLE LIBRCPP_INCLUDE_DIRS ) include_directories(BEFORE ${LIBR_INCLUDE_DIRS}) message(STATUS ${LIBR_INCLUDE_DIRS}) include_directories(BEFORE ${LIBRCPP_INCLUDE_DIRS}) message(STATUS ${LIBRCPP_INCLUDE_DIRS}) add_custom_target(RcppPackage ALL COMMAND find ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR} -name "*.o" -exec rm "{}" "\;" COMMAND find ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR} -name "*.so" -exec rm "{}" "\;" COMMAND ${LIBR_EXECUTABLE} "--slave" "-e" "\"stopifnot(require(roxygen2));roxygenize('${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}',roclets=c('rd','collate','namespace'))\"" COMMAND ${LIBR_EXECUTABLE} CMD INSTALL "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}")

  • Customize CMakeLists.txt such roxygenize and R CMD INSTALL

  • Generate project with cmake

mkdir build # don't create subdirectory of RcppPackage
cd build
cmake -G "Eclipse CDT4 - Unix Makefiles" <path to RcppPackage> -DCMAKE_ECLIPSE_GENERATE_SOURCE_PROJECT=TRUE

  • Open eclipse and import project from build(See cmake-eclipse-cdt for example). After indexing, enjoy several convenient features provided by Eclipse CDT such as tracing and autocomplete.

  • You can build the project which will be converted to R CMD INSTALL or anything in the CMakeLists.txt.