[R-pkg-devel] how to prevent a small package from yielding a large installed size?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 15/06/2020 12:30 p.m., Daniel Kelley wrote:
> Duncan, thanks very much for that very helpful hint.  I got as follows. 
>   My guess is that the first column in rdx$variables is an address 
> offset, and so it seems that the lion's share of the storage is 
> dedicated to items with names starting with a decimal point.  For 
> example, the "[[" item is at offset of nearly 4M.  I may try fiddling 
> with my code in which I specialize that method, to see whether I can 
> reduce the memory footprint.  From what I can gather, both linux and 
> windows build argoFloats into a package with R directory of about 2.5M 
> size, which is a lot better than what I get in macOS but still over the 
> warning threshold (I think) and therefore I worry about CRAN acceptance.

The second column is the size, so actually the lion's share is dedicated 
to things that are not being shown.  They are indexed in the 
rdx$references list, and are probably going to be harder to track down, 
because they probably don't have names assigned by you.

For example, in the rgl package, I see

 > rdx$references
$`env::1`
[1]  661 1037

$`env::10`
[1] 123952    221

$`env::11`
[1] 126378    224

$`env::12`
[1] 128575    226

[ many more deleted ]

Presumably `env::1` is an environment which might be referenced by 
several of the functions, and I'm guessing that one of yours is really 
big.  This can happen accidentally:  you have a temporary local variable 
in a function and create and save another function, or a formula, or 
some other environment-using object, and save the useless local variable 
along with it.

I don't have a good suggestion for figuring out what's in the bad 
environment; maybe someone else can suggest how to read an object from 
the .rdb file using R code.  Internally R uses C code for this.

Duncan Murdoch