[Rcpp-devel] Call by reference

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 29 July 2015 at 17:28, Rguy wrote:
| The reason I am interested in using call by reference is that I am accessing
| data frames with over a million rows and hundreds of columns. It is more
| efficient to operate on such a data frame directly, as opposed to copying it
| into and out of a function. In other words, I want to be *not* like R, which is
| why I am interested in utilizing C++, which supports call by reference.

You misunderstand.  We communicate by SEXP.  Where the P stands for pointer.
IE even with 

  R> M <- as.data.frame(matrix(rnorm(1e6, 1e3)))
  R> object.size(M)
  8000672 bytes
  R>

we'd still only pass the same 56 bytes a SEXP takes. See eg
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-ints.html#SEXPs and play with memory
profiling in R.

Dirk 

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