[Rprotobuf-yada] RprotoBuf initiation

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 9 February 2010 at 22:22, Romain Francois wrote:
| (I had to manually let this email through, please consider register to 
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Seconded. 
 
| 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 ?

I fear you may have misunderstood. Besides what Romain already said, note
that Protocol Buffers are

    a) language agnostic: Google itself supports C++, Java and Pythons; other
       have built support for more languages -- so there is nothing in
       Protocol Buffers that knows what R is, let alone S3 or S4

    b) an efficient way to encode data in an extensible way, so it really
       is a meta data and file format -- like XML or hdf5 or ...

Hope this helps. 

Dirk

| >
| > Thanks,
| > Etienne
| 
| -- 
| Romain Francois
| Professional R Enthusiast
| +33(0) 6 28 91 30 30
| http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
| |- http://tr.im/NrTG : Rcpp 0.7.5
| |- http://tr.im/MPYc : RProtoBuf: protocol buffers for R
| `- http://tr.im/KfKn : Rcpp 0.7.2
| 
| 
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