[R-sig-hpc] Serializing global state from within a namespace to distribute to other workers

[Roger Bivand]

Murray Stokely <murray at ...> writes:

> 
> I have a package which implements a parallelapply function for my
> environment but I'm having trouble moving the package into a NAMESPACE
> because of how the function is serialized by save() including the
> NAMESPACESXP of the package.
> 
...

This is only an oblique follow-up - are there any tools for finding out whether
the serialisation of an object will cause the serialisation of its environment?
I've looked around, for example in the codetools package, but do not see
anything obvious. I've also been hit by objects being serialised (both for snow
and even just for save() - which I think is the underlying mechanism here)
ending up about two orders of magnitude larger than the object.size() reported.

Roger


> 
> Is it possible to fully strip the namespace out of the .GLOBAL.FUN
> before I save() it such that it can be loaded into other R instances
> without trying to load the namespace?
> 
> Thanks for any pointers ..
> 
>             - Murray
>