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

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 6/15/20 6:52 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 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.

I think this can be done using lazyLoadDBfetch(key, file, compressed, 
hook). "key" is c(128575L, 226L) for "env::12" above. See 
library/base/R/lazyload.R. "file" is the .RDB file, "compressed" is 
TRUE, "envhook" for this can be "function(x) NULL"

Tomas

>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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