Here are some notes for myself as I’m getting betterr to run on Windows:
Working with shared libraries on Windows is seriously not fun.
The only way I got the program to run was to copy all DLLs and their dependencies into the directory with the executable.
When loading a DLL with LoadLibraryW, don’t try to add a path in front of the dll you’re loading, because the path will be ignored.
The string passed to LoadLibraryW needs to be std.utf.toUTF16z(string).
Working with import libraries is straightforward if you’re compiling the shared library with Visual Studio. R’s DLLs were compiled with mingw. Creating import libraries is a frustrating path to hell because you’ll never get it to work. There’s always a weird error with no information and no way to figure out what’s broken.
You have to compile RInside yourself and use it together with the version of R used to compile it. That’s a simple task these days. Install RTools and use devtools to build the package from the Github mirror: install_github("cran/rinside").
Creating dynamic bindings is a major task with tons of boilerplate. Fortunately it’s easy to dump all the functions in a struct, use metaprogramming to pull out the information needed, and return a string with all the information needed for the bindings.
I still haven’t finished the Windows bindings. Things are moving in the right direction, but there’s always an expectationt that things are goign down the toilet any minute when using Windows. I strongly encourage you to use WSL if you work on Windows. You will not regret it.