[Rd] Plans to improve reference classes?

[Michael Lawrence]

Could of requests:

1) Is there any example or writeup on the difficulties of extending
reference classes across packages? Just so I can fully understand the
issues.

2) In what sorts of situations does the performance of reference
classes cause problems? Sure, it's an order of magnitude slower than
constructing a simple environment, but those timings are in
microseconds, so one would need a thousand objects before it started
to be noticeable. Some motivating use cases would help.

Thanks,
Michael




On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 7:06 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
> Apart from speed, the most important advantage of R6 over ref classes
> is that's it easy to subclass a class defined in package A in package
> B. This is currently difficult with ref classes because of the way it
> does scoping. (And I think it's difficult to fix without fundamentally
> changing how ref classes work)
>
> Hadley
>
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 8:49 AM, Michael Lawrence
> <lawrence.michael at gene.com> wrote:
>> (Moved to R-devel)
>>
>> Niek,
>>
>> Would you please provide the details on this test case, including your
>> benchmarks, and what you are trying to achieve at the high-level?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Michael
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 4:55 AM, Niek Bouman <niek.bouman at keygene.com> wrote:
>>> Dear R-core team,
>>>
>>> I was wondering whether you have any plans to improve the current implementation of reference classes.
>>>
>>> Background:
>>> For a new project we will have many mutable objects, and we therefore want to use a construction like reference classes in this project. However, we observed that the speed performance of our implementation (using reference classes) for a simple test case is rather poor compared to a non-OOP implementation. Further, turning the reference classes into R6classes (using the R6 package) gave the best performance. As speed is an issue in our project, this would for us be an important reason  to use R6 classes instead of reference classes. The drawback, of course, is that the R6 package is developed by a single developer and that further development is therefore less certain than if we would use reference classes, which are in the core. Ideally we would like a system like R6 in the core of R. Are you planning to support R6, or improve reference classes to be on par with (or better than) R6 in terms of speed, in the core?
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Niek
>>>
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