The naive method of serializing R objects uses the built-in saveRDS. However,
this method has a major problem! Since R function objects carry information
about parent environments (that is, closures usually contain more information
than is needed), it is possible to get bloated R objects when serializing,
especially when these include function, formula, or environment objects.
The deflate package will take an R object and inspect it, pruning away unnecessary pieces so that the final object may be serialized without additional space bloat. In some cases, this has reduced 5GB+ objects to several megabytes.