[Rd] Best practices for writing R functions

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jul 22, 2011, at 9:26 AM, Alireza Mahani wrote:

> I am developing an R package for internal use, and eventually for public
> release. My understanding is that there is no easy way to avoid copying
> function arguments in R (i.e. we don't have the concept of pointers in R),
> which makes me wary of freely creating chains of function calls since each
> function call implies data copy overhead.
> 
> Is the above assessment fair?

No. Although R maintains the illusion of pass-by-value, it does to considerable length to prevent copying if not needed:

> r=rnorm(1e6)
> tracemem(r)
[1] "<0x103fa2000>"
> f = function(x) x
> invisible(f(f(f(f(f(f(r)))))))

As you see not a single copy is created even though there are 6 function calls.

As Spencer said, you should not worry unless you see a sign of a problem.

Cheers,
Simon


> Are there any good write-ups on best practices
> for writing efficient R libraries that take into consideration the
> above-mentioned limitations, and any others that might exist?
> 
> Thank you,
> Alireza
> 
> 
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