[R-gui] Getting started on R GUIs

[Anthony Berno]

>I'm not quite sure what's so obscure about the source code of the DCOM
server, but maybe it's 
>the fact, that there it uses some abstraction layer from R to provide a
more generic interface.

Thanks very much for your note. I'm probably going to use your COM
server directly now that I have a better overview of what's going on.
The code is only obscure when you are beginning without any kind of
roadmap; with no high-level description of what's going on, it's a
little hard to get the big picture from the code alone. But it makes a
whole lot more sense now that I've read people's comments here.

>I'm not sure what the performance issues you are addressing are. Could
you please clarify.

I haven't done much performance testing yet, so it might turn out that
using the COM server is every bit as fast as using the DLL directly.
Which would be great! But my primary concern is in getting big datasets
to R really fast, and getting ones back really fast, since the app I'm
using is extremely interactive and every bit of speed matters. If I
could get a vector of 100,000 numbers shipped across in less than half a
second, that would be great, but that may be an unrealistic expectation.

Maybe you can comment on this - between having a variant in VB and
having a vector in R, there are a bunch of marshalling and copying steps
that appear to take place. Compared to the time required for some simple
calculations on that vector, do you think that there is room for making
it faster by using the DLL directly? If you think the overhead is very
low, I will probably not bother with getting up to speed on the DLL and
testing it myself, but will just use your server.

By the way, I can't thank you enough for producing that server. Even if
I don't use it for this, I'll be using it for other things. It's really
a great thing to have, and provides a big head start on what I'm trying
to do!

-Anthony