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posit-dev / positron

Positron, a next-generation data science IDE
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Support workflows that involve C++, such as in R packages #2718

Open juliasilge opened 7 months ago

juliasilge commented 7 months ago

A fair amount of R packages involve C++ code, such as those using cpp11 or Rcpp. Let's consider how to support workflows where folks use C++. R package developers like to use VS Code for this, but the main extension(s) are proprietary and not on OpenVSX.

lionel- commented 7 months ago

The clangd extension (https://github.com/clangd/vscode-clangd) is open source but requires a bit more configuration: a compile_commands.json file that contains compiler flags for each file. Once set up correctly though, it's a very good analyzer.

It's been on our longer-term todo list to look into integration with pkgload / pkgbuild to construct the compilation database. I'm using https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear which works well. Windows support might be tricky: https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear/issues/431

Should we aim for RC for this issue?

juliasilge commented 7 months ago

Would you vote for RC @lionel-? I think we'll discuss in the next triage meeting as well.

rstub commented 7 months ago

Besides R packages using C++ there are also standalone C++ files that can be sourced using Rcpp::sourceCpp or cpp11::cpp_source(). In the RStudio IDE the "source" button uses these functions directly, which allows for convenient workflows.

lionel- commented 7 months ago

@juliasilge I think it's a nice-to-have for RC but not a blocker. Do we add such aspirational items to milestones and remove them later on if time is short?

kevinushey commented 7 months ago

Could Positron generate compile_commands.json by hand for the user? Either by inspecting the output of R CMD SHLIB --dry-run, or something similar with running make -n?

It'd be nice if this worked at least for the most common configurations, for packages containing some C / C++ files with perhaps some minimal versions of Makevars supported.

lionel- commented 4 months ago

https://github.com/r-lib/pkgload/pull/285 brings us much closer by making it possible to update a compile_commands.json file on each load_all(). This makes the package compatible with the clangd LSP server.

A manual intervention is required to set it up, currently the user needs to call pkgload:::use_compilation_db() (this will be exported from usethis in the future). We'll need to think about whether and how to advertise this on the frontend side. We could detect C/C++ code and a missing Config/build/compilation-database field in DESCRIPTION and prompt the user about whether they want to maintain a compilation database with devtools? This would be annoying to users of non-devtools workflows though.