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crbcc

crbcc is an R package that compiles R code to bytecode using a C implementation. It is intended as a fast, drop-in alternative to the base compiler package, for cases in which a reduced compilation time could be beneficial, eg. in research. However using crbcc for minor performance improvements inside R’s JIT pipeline is also possible.

This project was developed as part of a bachelor’s thesis at FIT CTU.

Acknowledgement

When possible, crbcc mirrors the architecture and logic used in the original GNU-R compiler package by Luke Tierney. The original compiler Noweb document is available at https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/compiler/compiler.pdf, or distributed as an R base package, available under the GPL-2 license. Most documentation provided in the document is relevant to crbcc as well.

Features

• 1:1 compatible output with current GNU-R compiler; cmpfun tested on a corpus consisting of around 339,000 lines of code
• 30x improvement on wall clock time when compiling base and recommended R packages

Interface

• Compile closures with crbcc::cmpfun()
• Compile generic language objects with crbcc::compile()
• Compile full source files with crbcc::cmpfile()
• Load compiled files with crbcc::loadcmp()

Requirements

• R >= 4.5.0
• Build toolchain for compiling native C code

Install

From source (local checkout)

R CMD INSTALL .

or with the provided Make target:

make install

Quick Start

library(crbcc)

f <- function(x) {
  y <- x + 1
  y * 2
}

cf <- cmpfun(f, options = list(optimize = 2))
cf(10)

Compile an R file

library(crbcc)

cmpfile("script.R", "script.Rc")
loadcmp("script.Rc", envir = .GlobalEnv)

Compiler options

The compiler accepts options as a named list:

• optimize (integer): optimization level (default 2)
• suppressAll (logical): suppress warnings (default TRUE)
• suppressNoSuperAssignVar (logical): suppress missing super-assignment variable warnings
• suppressUndefined (logical or character):
  • TRUE: suppress all undefined variable/function warnings
  • FALSE: suppress none
  • character(): suppress specific names

Example:

opts <- list(
  optimize = 2,
  suppressAll = FALSE,
  suppressUndefined = c("pi", "letters")
)

cf <- cmpfun(function(x) x + pi, options = opts)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome.

• Open an issue first for bugs, regressions, or feature proposals, especially if the compiler crashed on some expression or returned different results from GNU-R
• Keep pull requests focused and small when possible.
• Do not modify tests. Compatibility with GNU R compiler behavior is expected to remain 1:1.
• Run package checks before submitting (no new warnings or errors should rise):

R CMD check .

Known limitations

• Warning output is not guaranteed to be 1:1 with GNU R’s compiler package.
• cmpfile() currently does not support a functional verbose mode (the argument exists but is not implemented).
• Saving and loading functionality is not compatible with the GNU-R compiler, since it uses an .Internal call to manage the files.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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