Hy you all, 
Short version: 

I think I have some code that could be interesting to make the R
architecture evolve towards better thread support, easier memory
management, better user interface programming (progress bar, logs),
powerful debugging without recompiling (hach!)

some years ago I start learning C with an ambitious project: write a C
library for multivariate data analysis.  On the route I learned C quite
well and I discovered the power of scripting languages nad finally the S
language.

I wanted to write programs to perform routinely done exploratory data
analysis, using gnuplot as the graphic driver.

One of the my bigger concern has ever be memory management and
reentrancy of my code, possibly avoiding using OS support (such as
thread local storage on windows); I tried to allow for custom allocator
in the library, supporting ANSI functions as a ready option ...

I also have always used DOS (djgpp) and windows so I hated (and probably
strongly dislike) autoconf and the like: I tried to follow the advice
not to include to many #ifdef/#else/#endif in my code and to prefer to
configure my libraries at run-time.

Dealing with long calculations, I also wanted to make she/he let know
where the program is (it terms of time and or percentage achieved). I
wanted to deal with user cancellation requests and the rollback (free
memory, close files) associated with it.

Moreover I had to encapsulate logs, warning, errors and debugging
informations into specific interfaces so that my code could be used in
GUI-based application as well in console mode or in COM components (here
comes UNICODE!).

Now I have (thread safe, customizable: ALL, some UNICODE compatible): 

* an interface to memory management, usable with multiple threads,
  allowing to define and manipulate memory spaces (clean the space of
  the thread just stopped by user request), with customizable
  allocators;

* an interface to debug information, based on Fred Fish DBUG library
  used in mysql (it allows to trace the execution of the code, to print
  selected information, ...);

* an mprintf function to format messages in malloc'ed string (I have
  tested also the UNICODE version) stolen from mktclapp from
  www.hwaci.com; this maybe similar to R_printf;

* interfaces to errors, warnings, and log messages, with customizable
  callbacks to send the content of the massages every where you can send
  a char * or a wchar_t *; I followed the discussion on error handling
  on the gsl mailing list and tried to implement the ideas in
  http://t8web.lanl.gov/people/jungman/except.pdf I found quite
  interesting;

I would like to help with this code, if considered interesting. 

Best regards, 
Federico Spinazzi 
fspinazzi@hotmail.com