R devel - May 2009 - Can we generate exe file using R? What is the maximum file size valid?

Dear all,

I have two questions.

First, I am wondering whether we are able to use R to generate an exe file,
or sth that can be executable outside R?

Second, I am wondering whether read.csv can read a csv file with size of
300-400 gigabytes?

Thank you very much!

Min

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Chessxm wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I have two questions.
> 
> First, I am wondering whether we are able to use R to generate an exe
> file,
> or sth that can be executable outside R?
> 
> 
> 
It sounds as though you are looking for something similar to Matlab's mcc
compiler that allows Matlab code to be compiled and run independently from
the program by translating a script into C code.

To my knowledge there are only two projects that have attempted something
similar and both never progressed much past the experimental phase. The
first was called Scompile and was created by a fellow named Matt Calder. The
project has been defunct for a long time, but you might find some info at:

http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~hseltman/Scompile.html

Another recent project is r2c hosted at http://www.rforge.net . Both of
these programs are extremely limited in the types of scripts they can
convert and are probably wouldn't provide workable solution for a set of
general R scripts.

Your best shot at portability is probably to pack your code and/or data up
into an R package- that way it can be easily loaded on to any computer which
has R installed. Creating a package from an existing collection of R scripts
and data objects is very, very easy- see ?package.skeleton() and the
"Writing R Extensions" manual for starting points.



Chessxm wrote:
> 
> Second, I am wondering whether read.csv can read a csv file with size of
> 300-400 gigabytes?
> 
> Thank you very much!
> 
> Min
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 
> 
The problem here is that R likes to store all of it's variables in local
RAM- allocating a data frame for 300+ gigabytes worth of information is
likely to exceed your machine capacity. Many good workarounds exist for
this- most of them function by storing the variable in a database file and
only loading and accessing the parts that are needed at a given moment.

See the package "filehash" for an example of how to do this.

Hope this helps!

-Charlie


-----
Charlie Sharpsteen
Undergraduate
Environmental Resources Engineering
Humboldt State University
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Chessxm wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I have two questions.
> 
> First, I am wondering whether we are able to use R to generate an exe file,
> or sth that can be executable outside R?
No, there is no compiler for R.

> Second, I am wondering whether read.csv can read a csv file with size of
> 300-400 gigabytes?

No. You won't find many machines around that support more than 400 Gb 
for a single process.

Uwe Ligges






> 
> Thank you very much!
> 
> Min
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 7:45 PM, Chessxm <chessxm@gmail.com> wrote:
> First, I am wondering whether we are able to use R to generate an exe file,
> or sth that can be executable outside R?
>
Emacs creates self-contained exe files using a library called 'unexec';
this
allows all initialization, library loading, etc. to run first, then dumps
out a runnable exe image.  I don't know if anyone has worked on this for R.

Second, I am wondering whether read.csv can read a csv file with size
of
> 300-400 gigabytes?

Well, R data is normally held in main memory (RAM), so it would not be
practical on normal machines to have 300-400 GB of data.  There is a
big.memory package, but I don't know anything about it.

If you want to select a small subset of the very large file to work on, you
could certainly read it in in blocks of lines and only keep the data you
care about.

         -s

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Does Ra get close to compiled R ?   "The R code is compiled on the fly to 
bytecode which is executed internally by an interpreter in C."  The timing 
tests look impressive.
http://www.milbo.users.sonic.net/ra/