RInside, a set of convenience classes to facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications, was updated to release 0.2.0 over the weekend. Sources as well as binary packages are at CRAN; sources are also at my RInside page

The biggest news is that we now support builds on Windows — if and only if you use the R toolchain — more on that below. Since I had first released RInside people had emailed about support on Windows. However, Richard Holbrey deserves special mention as he actually sat down and tried to build it. Over a few email exchanges we made decent progress, but stalled. More recently, I sat down and had another go and lo and behold, it works. This required a few #ifdef statements here and there, as well as a function setenv() which Windows does not have — Richard kindly helped here and borrowed most of the code from R itself.

Now, to make this plain: you need gcc (as this is how R itself is built). This gcc compiler is the native compiler on Linux and OS X. But on Windows this requires installing the Rtools compiled by Duncan Murdoch as detailed in the The Windows Toolset appendix to the R Installation manual. Do not, I repeat, do not report an error if you fail to build this with another compiler as this is not supported.

That said, if you have the proper tools, things are peachy. Install the package, change into the examples directory installed with it and say make (or on Windows: make -f Makefile.win). That’s it — now run the examples (which on Windows will most likely require setting the environment variable R_HOME). Now you can run simple examples like the one from the previous blog post or any of the other ones.

Happy embedding!