This post is part of a series related to object oriented programming
in R and the package
aoos. The previous introduced how to work with the function retList.
One of the first things you will read about the R package R6 is that it fixes some performance issues compared to S4, i.e. the methods package. Although the benchmarks are in microseconds it is reported that it was still a noticeable difference in production systems (shiny). Reason enough to include aoos in the benchmark to get an idea of the implementation. There is a very detailed vignette in the R6 package from which I borrow the setup to make it comparable, although I restricted the performance vignette in aoos on the essentials.
The following is a vignette (in an iframe) also contained in the package itself. You can find it by copying the following into R:
install.packages("aoos")
vignette("performance", "aoos")Main findings: As the description in aoos already suggests, don’t use defineClass, it is not only experimental but also the slowest alternative. retList is faster than R6 because it is doing even less.