Writing R Extensions in Rust

Abstract

This paper complements "Writing R Extensions," the official guide for writing R extensions, for those interested in developing R packages using Rust. It highlights idiosyncrasies of R and Rust that must be addressed by any integration and describes how to develop Rust-based packages which comply with the CRAN Repository Policy. This paper introduces the "cargo" framework, a transparent Rust-based API which wraps commonly-used parts of R's API with minimal overhead and allows a programmer to easily add additional wrappers.