How to read a 1 GiB file into memory in R

Here is the start of a small and good discussion on how to read large data
sets into many. They appears frequently on the list, but this one seemed to
touch upon a lot of the recommended approaches:

• ColByCol
  • Mentions true cost of loading a 1 GiB file with read.table, which is much
    more than 1 GiB
• R.filesets
• Large memory and out-of-memory data in High-Performance and Parallel Computing with R
• Use a real database with SQLite or sqldf