I'm not convinced that how to make :: faster is the right question. If you are finding foo::bar being called often enough to matter to your overall performance then to me the question is: why are you calling foo::bar more than once? Making :: a bit faster by making it a primitive will remove some overhead, but your are still left with a lot of work that shouldn't need to happen more than once.
For default methods there ought to be a way to create those so the default method is computed at creation or load time and stored in an environment. For other cases if I want to use foo::bar many times, say in a loop, I would do foo_bar <- foo::bar and use foo_bar, or something along those lines. When :: and ::: were introduce they were intended primarily for reflection and debugging, so speed was not an issue. ::: is still really only reliably usable that way, and making it faster may just encourage bad practice. :: is different and there are good arguments for using it in code, but I'm not yet seeing good arguments for use in ways that would be performance-critical, but I'm happy to be convinced otherwise. If there is a need for a faster :: then going to a SPECIALSXP is fine; it would also be good to make the byte code compiler aware of it, and possibly to work on ways to improve the performance further e.g. through cacheing. Best, luke On Thu, 22 Jan 2015, Peter Haverty wrote:
Hi all, When S4 methods are defined on base function (say, "match"), the function becomes a method with the body "base::match(x,y)". A call to such a function often spends more time doing "::" than in the function itself. I always assumed that "::" was a very low-level thing, but it turns out to be a plain old function defined in base/R/namespace.R. What would you all think about making "::" and ":::" .Primitives? I have submitted some examples, timings, and a patch to the R bug tracker (https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=16134). I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on the matter. Regards, Pete ____________________ Peter M. Haverty, Ph.D. Genentech, Inc. phave...@gene.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
-- Luke Tierney Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386 Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017 Actuarial Science 241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke-tier...@uiowa.edu Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel