cppFuncton() emits .Primitive(".Call") instead of just .Call

[krlmlr]

See example below. This is a problem for joint profiling of R and native code, because I'm looking for .Call entries on the call stack, which are absent if the primitive is invoked directly (r-prof/jointprof#8). Would you accept a PR that swtiches to .Call()?

print(Rcpp::cppFunction("int x() { return 1; }"))
#> function () 
#> .Primitive(".Call")(<pointer: 0x7fd9fb532060>)

Created on 2018-01-03 by the reprex package (v0.1.1.9000).

[eddelbuettel]

Paging @jjallaire -- there was a reason for this but it escapes me now what that was.

[jjallaire]

I believe that I borrowed the implementation approach for native routine dispatching from the inline package (which presumably also does this although I haven't checked). I honestly don't understand the difference (if any) so would yield to any more knowledgeable opinion.

[eddelbuettel]

Well we can try. Seems like a larger change, but hey I have a new package for parallel reverse depends checks so we can try a PR.

[eddelbuettel]

Is this a 'hot' or needed item for the profiler you are working on?

[krlmlr]

Yes. It would be great to have it in the next Rcpp release, by when would you need it so that you can include it?

[eddelbuettel]

Gaa. Replied in the wrong place. Release is pretty much ready and I could ship nowishly.

[krlmlr]

I have a workaround for this problem in my code, so I don't mind if this has to wait a bit. Feel free to release (but thanks for the reminder).

[eddelbuettel]

Yeah, next release is better even though I have a feeling that this may end up being totally iinocuous.

[mattfidler]

For me, using .Primitive(".Call") was needed to avoid some R CMD Check issues; I just saw this and wanted to point out this issue. I think it is a bit silly and a false positive in this case, but I hade similar problems with dparser

[krlmlr]

Do you remember which particular issues are worked around this way?

[mattfidler]

Sure

Registration problem:
  symbol 'sym' in the local frame:
   .Call(sym, PACKAGE = pkg)
See chapter 'System and foreign language interfaces' in the 'Writing R
Extensions' manual.

If you put Primitive(".Call") this goes away. Eventually I settled on

eval(bquote(function()(.(quote(.Call))(.(sym), PACKAGE=.(pkg)))));

Which directly uses .Call and gets around this check issue.

[eddelbuettel]

Hm are you talking by chance about R CMD check output? You should never submit cppFunction() generated code (which is what this ticket is about) to R CMD check.

cppFunction() is for creating ad-hoc code at the prompt; such code usually does not go into a package where we use compileAttributes() instead.

There are helpers for the registration issue; compileAttributes() now does this for you.

[mattfidler]

Ah. I was confused. Thanks for the clarification. I only thought that was the reason.