Using 3rd party header files with Rcpp

Question

I have a header file called coolStuff.h that contains a function awesomeSauce(arg1) that I would like to use in my cpp source file.

Directo

Answer 1

I was able to link any library (MPFR in this case) by setting two environment variables before calling sourceCpp:

Sys.setenv("PKG_CXXFLAGS"="-I/usr/include")
Sys.setenv("PKG_LIBS"="-L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ -lm -lmpc -lgmp -lmpfr")

The first variable contains the path of the library headers. The second one includes the path of the library binary and its file name. In this case other dependent libraries are also required. For more details check g++ compilation and link flags. This information can usually be obtained using pkg-config:

pkg-config --cflags --libs mylib

For a better understanding, I recommend using sourceCpp with verbose output in order to print the g++ compilation and linking commands:

sourceCpp("mysource.cpp", verbose=TRUE, rebuild=TRUE)