[R-gui] tcltk MDI, R-GUI speed

[James Wettenhall]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Peng Liu wrote:
> I will try your R-wxPython soon. The major concern is which is faster, R
> -> rtcltk -> Tcl/Tk , or R -> RwxWindows -> RSPython -> wxPython, or it
> does not matter?

Hi Peng,

"faster" ? If you are concerned about speed, then you should
understand that both R-Tcl/Tk (already well developed) and
R-wxPython (still in prototyping stage) both go via a scripting
language (Tcl or Python) to get to the GUI toolkit, whereas it
might be more efficient to somehow access the GUI toolkit
directly (as is done in perl/Tk, i.e. perl does not use Tcl to
communicate with Tk).  If you want to do this, it would take
some hard work at the C programming level (low-level).

I'm sure a few people have tried this before and found it to
be too difficult.

But if you could pull it off, it could mean that a large
data frame in R could easily be displayed in a Tktable
(spreadsheet) widget much faster than using the current
mechanism (via Tcl).

Regards,
James