R devel - Jul 2012 - On RObjectTables

I was wondering if anyone knows more about the state of RObjectTables. This
largely undocumented functionality was introduced by Duncan around 2002
somewhere and enables you create an environment where the contents are
dynamically queried by R through a hook function. It is mentioned in R
Internals and ?attach. This functionality is quite powerful and allows you
to e.g. offload a big database of R objects to disk, yet use them as if
they were in your workspace. The recent RProtoBuf package also uses some of
this functionality to dynamically lookup proto definitions.

I would like to do something similar, but I am not sure if support for this
functionality will be or has been discontinued. The RObjectTables package
is no longer available on OmegaHat and nothing has not been mentioned on
the mailing lists for about 5 years. I found an old version of the package
no github which seems to work, but as far as I understand, the package
still needs the hooks from within R to work. So if this functionality is
actually unsupported and might be removed at some point, I should probably
not invest in it.

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

You might be able to take advantage of the ObjectTable support in C, which
is part of R, see R_ext/Callbacks.h.

Michael

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Jeroen Ooms
<jeroen.ooms@stat.ucla.edu>wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone knows more about the state of RObjectTables. This
> largely undocumented functionality was introduced by Duncan around 2002
> somewhere and enables you create an environment where the contents are
> dynamically queried by R through a hook function. It is mentioned in R
> Internals and ?attach. This functionality is quite powerful and allows you
> to e.g. offload a big database of R objects to disk, yet use them as if
> they were in your workspace. The recent RProtoBuf package also uses some of
> this functionality to dynamically lookup proto definitions.
>
> I would like to do something similar, but I am not sure if support for this
> functionality will be or has been discontinued. The RObjectTables package
> is no longer available on OmegaHat and nothing has not been mentioned on
> the mailing lists for about 5 years. I found an old version of the package
> no github which seems to work, but as far as I understand, the package
> still needs the hooks from within R to work. So if this functionality is
> actually unsupported and might be removed at some point, I should probably
> not invest in it.
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

I believe everyone who has worked on the relevant files has tried to
maintain this functionality, but as it seems to get used and tested
very little I can't be sure it is functional at this point. The
facility in its current form does complicate the internal code and
limit some experiments we might otherwise do, so I would not be
surprised if it was at least substantially changed in the next year or
two.

Best,

luke

On Thu, 19 Jul 2012, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone knows more about the state of RObjectTables. This
> largely undocumented functionality was introduced by Duncan around 2002
> somewhere and enables you create an environment where the contents are
> dynamically queried by R through a hook function. It is mentioned in R
> Internals and ?attach. This functionality is quite powerful and allows you
> to e.g. offload a big database of R objects to disk, yet use them as if
> they were in your workspace. The recent RProtoBuf package also uses some of
> this functionality to dynamically lookup proto definitions.
>
> I would like to do something similar, but I am not sure if support for this
> functionality will be or has been discontinued. The RObjectTables package
> is no longer available on OmegaHat and nothing has not been mentioned on
> the mailing lists for about 5 years. I found an old version of the package
> no github which seems to work, but as far as I understand, the package
> still needs the hooks from within R to work. So if this functionality is
> actually unsupported and might be removed at some point, I should probably
> not invest in it.
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
-- 
Luke Tierney
Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
    Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:   luke-tierney at uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu

Hi Jeroen

 I am restoring the packages on the Omegahat site as people
ask for them.

 I just put the RObjectTables package up in in its current form at
   http://www.omegahat.org/RObjectTables/
 and am happy to enhance it as needed.

 We can chat off-list, if you want.

   D.

On 7/19/12 10:30 AM, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone knows more about the state of RObjectTables. This
> largely undocumented functionality was introduced by Duncan around 2002
> somewhere and enables you create an environment where the contents are
> dynamically queried by R through a hook function. It is mentioned in R
> Internals and ?attach. This functionality is quite powerful and allows you
> to e.g. offload a big database of R objects to disk, yet use them as if
> they were in your workspace. The recent RProtoBuf package also uses some of
> this functionality to dynamically lookup proto definitions.
> 
> I would like to do something similar, but I am not sure if support for this
> functionality will be or has been discontinued. The RObjectTables package
> is no longer available on OmegaHat and nothing has not been mentioned on
> the mailing lists for about 5 years. I found an old version of the package
> no github which seems to work, but as far as I understand, the package
> still needs the hooks from within R to work. So if this functionality is
> actually unsupported and might be removed at some point, I should probably
> not invest in it.
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>