Can I load a third-party .dll in R?
c, dll, r
Solution
Yes, R can load it using `dyn.load`. You may or may not be able to actually call the functions it exports, though. Unless the functions' arguments correspond to what R can handle, they won't be usable. If this is the case, you can write a wrapper dll that acts as a translation layer between it and R.
Problem
I am running Windows 7, and I know the DLL was built using Visual Studio C++ 2010. Since I don't have the source code I can't build it on-the-fly in R when creating a package (NAMESPACE). At this stage, I don't need to create a package, I just want to load the library in R using `dyn.load()`. Since it is a dll I suppose it is portable to any client program, but I would just make sure, because I know that it was not compiled using `GNU gcc`. EDIT: I want to call all the functions that the dll deploys.