Developer helper script providing cc function. If one starts R session in data.table project root directory .dev/cc.R file should be automatically sourced (due to local .Rprofile file) making cc() (and dd()) function available straightaway.

cc(test=TRUE, clean=FALSE, debug=FALSE, omp=!debug, cc_dir, path=Sys.getenv("PROJ_PATH"), CC="gcc")

Use cc to re-compile all C sources and attach all data.table R functions (including non-exported ones). By default cc(test=TRUE) will also run main test script "tests.Rraw", so one may want to use cc(F) to re-compile and attach newly modified code but not run any test script. As of now running main tests with cc() requires to uninstall package to avoid S4 classes namespace issues (see #3808). When working on a bigger feature, one may want to put new unit tests into dedicated test file, then cc("feature.Rraw") can be used to run only chosen test script.

Usage of cc() from R:

# run test
cc()
# change some files, run test
cc()
# compile, reload but not test
cc(F)
# clean, compile, reload but not test
cc(F, T)
# clean, compile using specific compiler version, reload but not test
cc(F, T, CC="gcc-8")

Usage of dd() from R -d gdb:

run
dd()
# Ctrl-C
# break file.c:line
# c
# test and step between R and C

For more details see Debugging compiled code.

We provide make aliases to R commands commonly used during package development, see simplified examples below.

make build && make check
# R CMD build .
# R CMD check data.table_*.tar.gz

If changes were made to vignettes one should call R CMD explicitly as make's build or check are actually ignoring vignettes. See Makefile for exact commands.

make build && make install && make test
# R CMD build .
# R CMD INSTALL data.table_*.tar.gz
# R -e 'require(data.table); test.data.table()'

To speed up testing of changes one can use cc() function instead of make commands.

Procedure of multiple different checks that has to be performed as a CRAN release process.

Script used to check breaking changes in data.table on reverse dependencies from CRAN and BioC.

If a developer is using Windows OS we suggests to install MinGW-w64 (or similar software) in order to operate in Linux-like environment. This will allow one to use cc() R function, make commands, and many others Linux built-in productive utilities. Note that recent versions of Windows OS might be shipped with Linux embedded.