rcpptimer

Overview

This R Package provides Rcpp bindings for cpptimer, a simple tic-toc class for timing C++ code. It’s not just simple, it’s blazing fast! This sleek tic-toc timer class supports nested and overlapping timers and OpenMP parallelism. It boasts a nanosecond-level time resolution. Results (with summary statistics) are automatically passed back to R as a data.frame.

Install

Install rcpptimer from CRAN.

install.packages("rcpptimer")

Basic Usage with Rcpp::cppFunction

Here is a straightforward example of using the Rcpp::Timer with Rcpp::cppFunction:

Rcpp::cppFunction("
double demo_rnorm()
{
  Rcpp::Timer timer;
  timer.tic();
  double x = rnorm(1, 1)[0];
  timer.toc();
  return(x);
}",
  depends = "rcpptimer"
)

demo_rnorm()

The timer object will automatically write its result to the R environment:

print(times)
       Microseconds SD   Min   Max Count
tictoc        3.972  0 3.972 3.972     1

Check out the Documentation for:

• Setting up multiple, nested, and overlapping timers
• Using OpenMP parallelism
• Using rcpptimer with Rcpp::sourceCpp
• Adding rcpptimer to your package

Limitations

Processes taking less than a nanosecond cannot be timed.

Unmatched .tic() and .toc() calls do not raise errors at compile time. However, they throw warnings at runtime.

Acknowledgments

This package (and the underlying cpptimer class) was inspired by zdebruine’s RcppClock. I used that package a lot and wanted to add OpenMP support, alter the process of calculating summary statistics, and apply a series of other adjustments. I hope you find it useful.