[Rd] Implementing a single-precision class with raw

[Colin A. Smith]

A package that I develop (xcms) sometimes needs to read and process 
vectors several hundreds of megabytes in size. (They only represent 
parts of a large data sets which can approach nearly 100GB.) 
Unfortunately, R sometimes hits the 2GB memory limit of Win32. To help 
cut the memory footprint in half, I'm implementing a "float" class as a 
subclass of "raw". Because almost all the computation on the large 
vectors is done in C code, having a somewhat limited single-precision 
data type is okay.

I've run into a limitation with the .C() function where it does not 
handle raw vectors, which it will do in 2.2.0. In the meantime, I'm 
using the .Call() function to access the raw vectors. However, there 
don't seem to be any macros for handling raw vectors in Rdefines.h. 
I've made a guess at what those macros would be and was wondering 
whether my guesses were correct and/or might be included in 2.2.0:

#define NEW_RAW(n) allocVector(RAWSXP,n)
#define RAW_POINTER(x) (RAW(x))
#define AS_RAW(x) coerceVector(x,RAWSXP)

I'm not sure whether coerceVector(x,RAWSXP) will actually work. Also, 
there isn't an Rf_isRaw() function, which would be useful for an 
IS_RAW(x) macro.

Another issue with the "float" class is that it will run into endian 
issues if it ever gets saved to disk and moved cross-platform. I don't 
really anticipate that happening but it might be nice to incorporate 
serialization hooks if possible. Are there any facilities in R for 
doing that?

Thanks for any feedback or suggestions.

-Colin

http://abagyan.scripps.edu/~csmith/float.R
http://abagyan.scripps.edu/~csmith/float.c