[RQt-devel] recent smoke update

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Michael Lawrence
<lawrence.michael at gene.com> wrote:

> Ok, this looks interesting. After we fix this bug though, I think we need to
> make qtbase convert QColor to the high-level integer matrix as returned by
> qcolor(). And QPen might belong as an R list, as I think you were doing
> before. In general, I think the value types like QColor, QMatrix, etc,
> should be converted to native R structures, instead of opaque external
> pointers. The functions already exist for this; they just need to integrated
> better into the smoke stuff.

Sure, but could you outline the advantages? What I mean is that even
for things with obvious analogs, the Qt pointer representation may
give some useful freebies; let's say QImage::invertPixels(). I see the
point in making it into a native R structure, but wouldn't it be
better to have access to both at the user level? So I'm thinking of

im <- Qt$QImage("foo.png")

returning a "QImage", and have user-level as.raster() and as.QImage()
methods for conversion.

Is there a technical advantage (like more stability) to not allowing
something like this for the value types? What about things that don't
have an obvious analog?

-Deepayan