My thanks to Bill Dunlap and Simon Urbanek for clarifying many of the details. This gives me what I need to go forward.
Yes, I will likely convert more and more things to .Call over time. This clearly gives the most control over excess memory copies. I am getting more comments from people using survival on huge data sets so memory usage is an issue I'll be spending more thought on. I'm not nearly as negative about .C as Simon. Part of this is long experience with C standalone code: one just gets used to the idea that mismatched args to a subroutine are deadly. A test of all args to .C (via insertion of a browser call) is part of initial code development. Another is that constructing the return argument from .Call (a list with names) is a bit of a pain. So I will sometimes use dup=F. However, the opion of R core about .C is clear, so it behooves me to move away from it. Thanks again for the useful comments. Terry Therneau ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
