Delete all copies / delete by reference
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100
Research direction
Start with the linked Stack Overflow question and the existing copy() behavior described in the issue. Trace how data.table references are represented and identify the package entry points and tests for reference-based operations. Done should mean the requested delete-by-reference behavior is defined, implemented, and covered by tests for multiple variables sharing one data.table.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Assigning a data.table to another variable creates a copy by reference unless you explicitly use the copy() function. If you have multiple variables that reference a single data.table in memory, it would be nice to provide a mechanism to delete a data.table and all references to it, as per this recent SO question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52974000/delete-an-entire-data-table-by-reference/
- Dominant language
- R
- Stars
- 3.9k
- Forks
- 1.1k
- Avg merge
- 14h 4m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 4
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
More from Rdatatable/data.table
-
as.data.table() recurses without end on a survival::Surv object (or any data.frame carrying one) Open
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 88/100
Rdatatable/data.table#7887 ·
-
consistency tests
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 68/100
Rdatatable/data.table#7853 · 3 comments ·
-
internals
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 65/100
Rdatatable/data.table#6938 · 1 comment ·
-
encoding fread
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 65/100
Rdatatable/data.table#5179 · 8 comments ·
-
documentation programming
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 68/100
Rdatatable/data.table#3199 · 3 comments ·
All issues in Rdatatable/data.table
Similar issues
-
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 82/100
r-lib/pkgdepends#485 · 3 comments ·
-
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 92/100
-
beginners blocker
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 78/100
-
enviPathR OpenBuild Error Build OK Build Warning policies-accepted pre-review precheck-passed
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 84/100
Bioconductor/BiocContributions#207 · 6 comments ·
-
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 74/100
datacarpentry/semester-biology#1255 ·