Feature request: Write rasters to disc

[geryan]

Would be totes fab to be able to specify a filepath/pattern and write output rasters to disc rather than forcibly hold them in memory when running simulation.

Especially for long runs and large habitat suitability inputs this would help memory management much more betterer.

[geryan]

NB reading rasters from disc makes the plot method very slow, in particular getting the population size. Using future_lapply instead of lapply in get_pop_replicate can significantly improve this

[goldingn]

raster should automatically be reading and writing rasters from disk (in a temporary file directory) if it looks like you don't have enough memory for each object. You can control this behaviour a bit with rasterOptions()

Agreed there could be more use of parallelism in the plotting bit

[geryan]

The other part of the issue I guess isn't the writing to disk per se, but being able to save, export and read-in results later, which isn't easily managed from temp files.

[cvisintin]

Can you please expand upon this bit:
"being able to save, export and read-in results later, which isn't easily managed from temp files"
What is your current workflow? What is difficult? What would you like the behaviour to be?

[geryan]

I guess it's OK if the rasters are in memory, you can export and read in again later. If the rasters are large and written to a temp file somewhere then it's not possible to simply export the results object to read in elsewhere because the temp files will be missing.