Hello, I apologize if this is not the list for package announcements. Having said that I've released a package called rprotos which implements a simple serialization using Googles protocol buffers[1]. The package also includes some miscellaneous functions for writing/ reading variable length encoded integers, and Base64 encoding/decoding related functions. The package can be downloaded from http://ml.stat.purdue.edu/rproto_1.0.tar.gz it requires one to install libproto (Googles protobuffer library) Brief Description: The R objects that can be serialized are numerics, integers,strings, logicals, raw,nulls and lists. Attributes of the aforementioned are preserved. NA is also preserved(for the above) As such, the objects include factors and matrices. The proto file can be found in the source. Todo: Very possible though needs some reading on my part: it is possible to extend this to serialize functions, expressions, environments and several other objects. However that is some time in the future. Regards Saptarshi [1] http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html Download: http://ml.stat.purdue.edu/rproto_1.0.tar.gz Saptarshi Guha | saptarshi.guha@gmail.com | http://www.stat.purdue.edu/~sguha [[alternative HTML version deleted]]