[GRASS-dev] Re: Integrate XDR lib into GRASS?

[Roger Bivand]

Patrice Dumas <pertusus <at> free.fr> writes:

> 
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 04:24:11PM +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Patrice Dumas <pertusus <at> free.fr> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 02:42:27PM +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:
> > ...


...


> >     This function is missing on some platforms: Cygwin 1.7.4, mingw, BeOS.
> > 
> > ... and MingW is one of the relevant platforms...
> 
> Indeed, it seems in fact that none of xdr* are really implemented, so
> that the platforms where the function is missing are merely listed...
> But if R and grass both need it, that's a hint that it may make sense to
> add them, even though you don't end up using it!
> 
> I'll certainly go ask on the gnulib mailing list whether there is
> specific issue with xdr and gauge the interest there.
> 

For your information, R serialisation is moving away from XDR, which was written
for Motorola and Sparc and assumes (I understand) big-endianness internally.
Since most R platforms are now little-endian, serialising through XDR turns out
to be a major performance hit for saving objects, and for passing objects via
serialisation to worker nodes/cores. See:

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-January/063071.html
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-January/063108.html

Hope this is relevant,

Roger