Implement paste() about r HOT 2 CLOSED

Great question!

do I understand correctly that we want to implement paste() as a primitive (written in Rust?) function

Quick answer first - then more discussion:

Yep, that's what I was thinking. If your goal is to use this as an opportunity to implement some R concepts in rust, I would say go for it.

But this also brings up a good question about what our goals should be. My original goal was to use this little exercise to learn some rust and experiment with what I thought would be cool enhancements to R, but the project has gotten a bit of momentum now and if others want to see it as a practical replacement, we might need to go back to the drawing board in terms of how we approach the problem.

A more pragmatic approach would be to call into R's internal implementations to bootstrap a new implementation, allowing for a slow migration from C to rust. In this case, we can find R's paste code here. Probably this would involve first building a rust interface to the libR shared library.

Interfacing with R's internals would be a big shift in the project, though. It would mean that the rust representations of R objects need to be more direct analogs of the C implementations, or at least add a translation layer to and from rust representations.

from r.

Thanks Doug!

Since I want to learn Rust, I will go with pure Rust for now :) I can not believe that paste() is 757 lines of code in C, let's see if Rust can do it with a shorter logic.

I was thinking to grab the unit test from R source code and I could not find a test for paste(), my search.

from r.