[Rprotobuf-yada] RprotoBuf initiation

[Romain Francois]

Hi,

(I had to manually let this email through, please consider register to 
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more emails)

protocol buffers are dumb data containers, as such they don't have logic 
(methods, etc ...), so you can't build an object oriented system on them.

As far as I am concerned, protobuf are just a way to structure data and 
transfer it to various languages. So for example if you serialize a 
message in R (with RProtoBuf) and deserialize it in java, you get the 
same data.

Does that help ?

Romain

On 02/09/2010 09:45 PM, Etienne Bellemare Racine wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Following the annouce of the release of RprotoBuf I read on romain's
> blog
> <http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2010/02/04/RProtoBuf%3A-protocol-buffers-meet-R>,
> To his suggestion, I repost my comment here for an open discussion.
>
> RprotoBuf seems promizing, but could you provide a scenario comparing
> the traditional R approach and the proto buffer approach ? Are you
> suggesting the use the proto buffer instead of S4 class definition ? It
> appear like a way to access and store larger data structures by not
> loading it in memory, am I wrong ?
>
> Thanks,
> Etienne

-- 
Romain Francois
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http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
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