From ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk  Tue Oct  9 08:46:30 2001
From: ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2001 08:46:30 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] New slimmer R
In-Reply-To: <3BC2A1BB.7E2FE27B@durham.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.31.0110090834140.1997-100000@gannet.stats>

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

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[Rd] New slimmer R
Prof Brian Ripley