use frames in Stata 16

[laszlosandor]

Stating the obvious: We should do away with the preserve-restore cycle whenever we can. In many big data projects, that was the bottleneck because of the disk I/O involved. I once rewrote binscatter just to avoid it. So, celebrate and spread the word: Stata can finally hold multiple datasets in memory.

[laszlosandor]

Oops, at the bottom of that very page:

The do- and ado-files that you have previously written that use preserve and restore will run faster if you use Stata/MP because it secretly uses frames in place of temporary files to preserve data.

[mdroste]

Hey Laszlo,

Definitely! As I think Sergio pointed out on the gtools issue you created, it is really irksome that preserve/restores are now implicit frames in some versions of Stata and not others. In any case, I'd like to see how much this matters, but I don't yet have institutional access to Stata 16.