New slimmer R
On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Jonathan Rougier wrote:
Hi Everyone, I know that Kurt is thinking about slimming down the core functions of R and putting more stuff into libraries. I was wondering if, as a first step, thought had been given to re-organising the source code to separate out the S-language functionality from the base package functions. I am thinking in particular of the subdirectory src/main which contains both top-level files such as "memory.c" and base-package files such as "optim.c". Would it not be clearer to mount the base package entirely on src/library and so put the required C files into the subdirectory src/library/base/src (which currently does not exist)?
Not really. If base remains a package, then base.so would have always to be loaded, and no reduction would result. Also optim() etc are implemented via .Internal, and at present .Internal functions (and primitives) are determined by a compiled-in table. So the net result would a lot of work, slower loading and probably a net increase in the size of the running image. It seems to me that slimming-down will only work (well) once we can split base into a number of sub-packages which are auto-loaded as needed (not necessarily by the autoload mechanism), and namespaces will be useful when going along that route. Most of the space we could save is R code, not compiled C code. I introduced modules to save much of the latter. Brian
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272860 (secr) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._