Setting up your machine for the compilation of source packages

Compilation of source code is the process of converting human-readable code into machine-readable code that can be executed by a computer. It varies on different chips and operating systems because the machine code that is produced must be specific to the architecture of the target platform. A compiler is a program that performs the compilation process.

Some R packages are written in C or Fortran because they are low-level programming languages that can execute faster than R in certain situations. Additionally, C code can be easily integrated into R packages, allowing for faster computations and improved performance. To take advantage of the better performance, some R packages from the source will need to have their foreign language parts compiled. In this brief recipe, we’ll look at tricks and shims for installing code that must be compiled on various platforms.

Getting ready

We don’t need anything...