speed up loading tikzDevice

Sharpie / RTikZDevice

A R package for producing graphics output as PGF/TikZ code for use in TeX documents.

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speed up loading tikzDevice #43

Closed yihui closed 12 years ago

yihui commented 12 years ago

I have two quick suggestions for zzz.R since I see it is slightly slow to load tikzDevice:

no need to require(filehash) as long as it is stated in DESCRIPTION
if the user has specified the options in advance (e.g. in .Rprofile), tikzDevice may just go with them and do not go through the process of checking pdflatex and xelatex

Sharpie commented 12 years ago

Agreed. Overhauling the process used to locate TeX compliers has been on the TODO list---it is slow and doesn't scale well. Now that support for LuaTeX is on the horizon, we need something better.

Lately I just haven't had the time to work on it.

Sharpie commented 12 years ago

Just cut a 0.6.2 release to push a bugfix and clear up some issues with CRAN checks on R-devel. This release removes require(filehash) from zzz.R.

Version 0.7.0 will contain new code for locating TeX compilers.

Sharpie commented 12 years ago

I've played around with this a little bit. Here is the time it takes to load v0.6.2:

> system.time(require(tikzDevice, quietly=TRUE))

...

   user  system elapsed 
  0.220   0.033   0.262

If I completely remove all the compiler checking code, I get:

> system.time(require(tikzDevice, quietly = TRUE))

...

   user  system elapsed 
  0.200   0.007   0.209

The compiler checks definitely need to be re-factored to be more generic and maintainable, but I don't think it is worth putting time into a speed-up that is on the order of hundredths or even tenths of a second.

yihui commented 12 years ago

0.26 sounds great. Thanks!