[R] long vectors not supported yet

[Jeff Newmiller]

It does appear to be an error message from R [1] regarding the difference between the maximum length of a data vector (~2^59) and the maximum length of a matrix/array/data frame dimension (~2^31).

As to whether this is under consideration for change, I don't know but I would not want such information to affect how I work around the limitation today because it may come with bugs initially anyway. 

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24335692/large-matrices-in-r-long-vectors-not-supported-yet
-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On February 15, 2018 4:33:13 AM PST, Loris Bennett <loris.bennett at fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>Hi Jeff,
>
>Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us> writes:
>
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> I am running R 3.3.3 and getting the following error:
>>> 
>>> Error in add_edges(res, edges = t(as.matrix(el[, 1:2])), attr =
>weight)
>>> : 
>>>    long vectors not supported yet:
>../../src/include/Rinlinedfuns.h:138
>>> 
>>> when passing a 13 GB TransitionLayer object to shortestPath from the
>>> package 'gdistance'.
>>> 
>>> The error, albeit in a different context, is discussed here:
>>> 
>>>   https://github.com/tidyverse/readr/issues/309
>>>   https://github.com/tidyverse/readr/pull/433
>>> 
>>> However it is not clear to me quite what the fix was and what kind
>of
>>> limit may still exist in subsequent R versions.
>>> 
>>> Is this a general problem/issue with R, or is this something more
>>> package-specific which should be addressed on R-sig-Geo?
>
>> This looks to me like a package development issue... which may be
>> under discussion in R-sig-geo (search the archives), but more likely
>> to be appropriate to discuss with the maintainer by email or through
>> their development repository (R-forge, though it looks unused).
>
>Thanks for the information.  I reported the issue to the developers of
>'igraph', which is where 'add_edges' comes from, here
>
>  https://github.com/igraph/rigraph/issues/255
>
>The response there to the question of whether it is an R core or an
>igraph issue was
>
>  R core for sure, but probably both.
>
>Is this indeed the case for R core?  To my naive eye, the error message
>suggests more of a known limitation, rather than a bona fide bug.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Loris