Serguei, The R 3.5.0 release includes the fundamental ALTREP framework but does not include many 'hooks' within R's source code to make use of methods on the ALTREP custom vector classes. I have implemented a fair number, including for mean() to use the custom Sum method when available, in the ALTREP branch but unfortunately we did not have time to test and port them to the trunk in time for this release. The current plan, as I understand it, is that we will continue to develop and test these, and other hooks, and then when ready they will be ported into trunk/R-devel over the course this current development cycle for inclusion in the next release of R.
My hope is that the end-user benefits of ALTREP will really show through much more in future releases, but for now, things like mean will will behave as they always have from a user perspective. Best, ~G On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 2:31 AM, Serguei Sokol <so...@insa-toulouse.fr> wrote: > Hi, > > By looking at a doc about ALTREP https://svn.r-project.org/R/br > anches/ALTREP/ALTREP.html (by the way congratulations for that and for > R-3.5.0 in general), I was a little bit surprised by the following example: > > > x <- 1:1e10 > > system.time(print(mean(x))) > [1] 5e+09 > user system elapsed > 38.520 0.008 38.531 > > Taking 38.520 s to calculate a mean value of an arithmetic sequence seemed > a lot to me. It probably means that calculations are made by running into a > for loop while in the case of arithmetic sequence a mean value can simply > be calculated as (b+e)/2 where b and e are the begin and end value > respectively. Is it planned to take benefit of ALTREP for functions like > mean(), sum(), min(), max() and some others to avoid running a for loop > wherever possible? It seems so natural to me but after all some > implementation details preventing this can escape to me. > > Best, > Serguei. > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > -- Gabriel Becker, Ph.D Scientist Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Genentech Research [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
