Provide a sparse matrix format with data stored on disk, to be used in both R and C++. This is intended for more efficient use of sparse data in C++ and also when parallelizing, since data on disk does not need copying. Only a limited number of features will be implemented. For now, conversion can be performed from a 'dgCMatrix' or a 'dsCMatrix' from R package 'Matrix'. A new compact format is also now available.
copied from cf-post-staging / r-bigsparser