R package

R packages are extensions to the R statistical programming language. R packages contain code, data, and documentation in a standardised collection format that can be installed by users of R, typically via a centralised software repository such as CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network).^[1][2] The large number of packages available for R, and the ease of installing and using them, has been cited as a major factor driving the widespread adoption of the language in data science.^[3][4][5][6]

R logo

Compared to libraries in other programming language, R packages must conform to a relatively strict specification.^[3] The Writing R Extensions manual^[7] specifies a standard directory structure for R source code, data, documentation, and package metadata, which enables them to be installed and loaded using R's in-built package management tools.^[3] Packages distributed on CRAN must meet additional standards.^[3][8] According to John Chambers, whilst these requirements "impose considerable demands" on package developers, they improve the usability and long-term stability of packages for end users.^[3]

Repositories

Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)

 

The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) homepage

The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) is R's central software repository, supported by the R Foundation.^[9] It contains an archive of the latest and previous versions of the R distribution, documentation, and contributed R packages.^[10] It includes both source packages and pre-compiled binaries for Windows and macOS.^[11] As of November 2020^[update], more than 16,000 packages are available.^[12] CRAN was created by Kurt Hornik and Friedrich Leisch in 1997,^[13][14] with the name paralleling other early packing systems such as TeX's CTAN (released 1992) and Perl's CPAN (released 1995).^[15] As of 2021^[update], it is still maintained by Hornik and a team of volunteers.^[9] The master site is located at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and is mirrored on servers around the world.^[10]

 

Homepage for R CRAN Task Views

The "Task Views" page (subject list) on the CRAN website^[16] lists a wide range of tasks (in fields such as finance, genetics, high performance computing, machine learning, medical imaging, meta-analysis, social sciences and spatial statistics) for which R packages are available. Another way to browse CRAN packages is provided by Metacran,^[17] which also maintains lists of featured, most downloaded, trending or most depended upon packages.

The number of CRAN packages has grown exponentially for many years,^[18] and as of 2018^[update] an average of 21 submissions of new or updated packages were made every day.^[6] Since each submission is manually reviewed by a small team of CRAN maintainers, many of whom, according to R core developer Peter Dalgaard, are "approaching pensionable age", there is a concern that this system is not sustainable in the long term.^[6] The growth of CRAN has exposed limitations of its dependency management infrastructure, particularly the fact that it assumes that dependencies always refer to the latest version of a package, meaning that new releases of CRAN packages must always be backwards compatible,^[19] and that CRAN packages cannot have dependencies that are not on CRAN.^[20] It has also led to concerns about declining quality of packages.^[21]

MRAN and Posit Package Manager

 

Homepage for the Microsoft R Application Network (MRAN)

The Microsoft R Application Network (MRAN) is a mirror of CRAN maintained by Microsoft which is based on the company's downstream distribution of R, Microsoft R Open (formerly Revolution R Open).^[22] It also includes an archive of daily CRAN snapshots, branded as the "CRAN Time Machine", which enables users of MRAN to bypass the dependency versioning limitations of CRAN by installing a fixed set of R package versions via the package checkpoint.^[23][24] In January 2023 Microsoft announced that MRAN was being retired and the associated websites and repositories became unavailable in July 2023.^[25]

 

Homepage for the Posit Package Manager

The Posit Package Manager (formerly RStudio Package Manager) is a similar tool produced by the developers of RStudio which, in addition to CRAN snapshots, includes an archive of R packages from Bioconductor and Python packages from the Python Package Index.^[26] It also distributes pre-compiled binary packages for Linux (only Windows and macOS binaries are included on CRAN).^[27]

Other repositories

The Bioconductor project provides R packages for the analysis of genomic data. This includes object-oriented data-handling and analysis tools for data from Affymetrix, cDNA microarray, and next-generation high-throughput sequencing methods.^[28]

 

Homepage for R-Forge

R-Forge,^[29] is a central platform for the collaborative development of R packages, R-related software, and projects. R-Forge also hosts many unpublished beta packages, and development versions of CRAN packages.

Base and recommended packages

R is distributed with fifteen "base packages": base, compiler, datasets, grDevices, graphics, grid, methods, parallel, splines, stats, stats4, tcltk, tools, translations, and utils.^[30]

In addition, there are fifteen "recommended packages" from CRAN which are included with binary distributions of R: KernSmooth, MASS, Matrix, boot, class, cluster, codetools, foreign, lattice, mgcv, nlme, nnet, rpart, spatial, and survival.^[30]

Other packages

A group of packages called the tidyverse, which can be considered a "dialect of the R language", is increasingly popular in the R ecosystem. As of 2020-06-13, Metacran^[17] listed 7 of the 8 core packages of the tidyverse in the list of most downloaded R packages. The group of packages strives to provide a cohesive collection of functions to deal with common data science tasks, including data import, cleaning, transformation and visualisation (notably with the ggplot2 package).

The R Infrastructure packages^[31] support coding and the development of R packages and as of 2021-05-04, Metacran^[17] lists 16 of these packages among the 25 most downloaded packages.

See also

• tidyverse
• ggplot2
• knitr

References

1. Hornik, Kurt (2020-02-20). "Frequently Asked Questions on R". The Comprehensive R Archive Network. 7.29: What is the difference between package and library?. from the original on 2011-07-09. Retrieved 2 November 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
2. Wickham, Hadley; Bryan, Jennifer. "Introduction". R Packages (2nd ed.). from the original on 2022-06-29. Retrieved 2020-11-02.
3. Chambers, John M. (2020). "S, R, and Data Science". The R Journal. 12 (1): 462–476. doi:10.32614/RJ-2020-028. ISSN 2073-4859. from the original on 2020-11-01. Retrieved 2020-11-02.
4. Vance, Ashlee (2009-01-06). "Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power". New York Times. from the original on 2021-05-02. Retrieved 2020-11-02.
5. Tippmann, Sylvia (2014-12-29). "Programming tools: Adventures with R". Nature News. 517 (7532): 109–110. doi:10.1038/517109a. PMID 25557714.
6. Thieme, Nick (2018). "R generation". Significance. 15 (4): 14–19. doi:10.1111/j.1740-9713.2018.01169.x. ISSN 1740-9713.
7. "Writing R Extensions". The Comprehensive R Archive Network. from the original on 2020-11-12. Retrieved 2020-11-02.
8. "CRAN Repository Policy". The Comprehensive R Archive Network. from the original on 2020-11-05. Retrieved 2020-11-02.
9. CRAN Repository Maintainers. "CRAN Repository Policy". The Comprehensive R Archive Network. R Project. from the original on 11 November 2020. Retrieved 20 November 2020.
10. Hornik, Kurt (2020-02-20). "Frequently Asked Questions on R". The Comprehensive R Archive Network. 2.1: What is CRAN?: R Project. from the original on 2011-07-09. Retrieved 20 November 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
11. CRAN Repository Maintainers. "The Comprehensive R Archive Network". R Project. from the original on 23 January 2019. Retrieved 20 November 2020.
12. CRAN Repository Maintainers. "CRAN - Contributed Packages". The Comprehensive R Archive Network. CRAN. from the original on 24 November 2020. Retrieved 20 November 2020.
13. Hornik, Kurt (1997-04-23). "ANNOUNCE: CRAN". r-announce (Mailing list). from the original on 2021-03-08. Retrieved 20 November 2020.
14. Thieme, Nick (2018). "R generation". Significance. 15 (4): 14–19. doi:10.1111/j.1740-9713.2018.01169.x. ISSN 1740-9713.
15. Fitzgerald, Brian (2016-02-09). "A Survey of Programming Language Package Systems". Some Things Are Obvious. from the original on 2020-11-09. Retrieved 4 May 2021.
16. "CRAN Task Views". cran.r-project.org. from the original on 2011-07-09. Retrieved 2018-09-16.
17. "Metacran". from the original on 2021-04-20. Retrieved 2021-05-04.
18. Asay, Matt (April 21, 2016). "Exponential growth of R's open source community threatens commercial competitors". TechRepublic. from the original on 2020-10-26. Retrieved 2020-11-02.
19. Ooms, Jeroen (2013). "Possible Directions for Improving Dependency Versioning in R". The R Journal. 5 (1): 197–206. arXiv:1303.2140. doi:10.32614/RJ-2013-019. ISSN 2073-4859. S2CID 6791850. from the original on 2020-09-19. Retrieved 2020-11-02.
20. Decan, A.; Mens, T.; Claes, M.; Grosjean, P. (2016). "When GitHub Meets CRAN: An Analysis of Inter-Repository Package Dependency Problems". 2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER). Vol. 1. pp. 493–504. doi:10.1109/SANER.2016.12. ISBN 978-1-5090-1855-0. S2CID 16751624. from the original on 2021-01-16. Retrieved 2021-05-12.
21. Hornik, Kurt (2012). "Are There Too Many R Packages?". Austrian Journal of Statistics. 41 (1): 59–66–59–66. doi:10.17713/ajs.v41i1.188. ISSN 1026-597X. from the original on 2020-11-26. Retrieved 2020-11-02.
22. "Welcome to MRAN". Microsoft R Application Network. Microsoft. from the original on 4 May 2021. Retrieved 4 May 2021.
23. "Reproducibility: Using Fixed CRAN Repository Snapshots". Microsoft R Application Network. Microsoft. from the original on 2 May 2021. Retrieved 4 May 2021.
24. Smith, David (2019-05-22). "MRAN snapshots, and you". Revolutions. Revolution Analytics. from the original on 2021-05-04. Retrieved 4 May 2021.
25. "Microsoft R Application Network retirement". techcommunity.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
26. Lopp, Sean (2020-12-07). "RStudio Package Manager 1.2.0 - Bioconductor & PyPI". RStudio Blog. RStudio. from the original on 2021-05-04. Retrieved 4 May 2021.
27. Lopp, Sean (2020-07-01). "Announcing Public Package Manager and v1.1.6". RStudio Blog. RStudio. from the original on 2021-05-04. Retrieved 4 May 2021.
28. Huber, W; Carey, VJ; Gentleman, R; Anders, S; Carlson, M; Carvalho, BS; Bravo, HC; Davis, S; Gatto, L; Girke, T; Gottardo, R; Hahne, F; Hansen, KD; Irizarry, RA; Lawrence, M; Love, MI; MacDonald, J; Obenchain, V; Oleś, AK; Pagès, H; Reyes, A; Shannon, P; Smyth, GK; Tenenbaum, D; Waldron, L; Morgan, M (2015). "Orchestrating high-throughput genomic analysis with Bioconductor". Nature Methods. 12 (2). Nature Publishing Group: 115–121. doi:10.1038/nmeth.3252. PMC 4509590. PMID 25633503.
29. "R-Forge: Welcome". from the original on 2018-09-14. Retrieved 2018-09-16.
30. Hornik, Kurt (2020-02-20). "Frequently Asked Questions on R". The Comprehensive R Archive Network. 5.1: Which add-on packages exist for R?. from the original on 2011-07-09. Retrieved 2 November 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
31. "R infrastructure". GitHub. from the original on 2021-05-19. Retrieved 2021-05-04.

Further reading

• Claes, M.; Mens, T.; Grosjean, P. (2014). "On the maintainability of CRAN packages". 2014 Software Evolution Week - IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance, Reengineering, and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE). pp. 308–312. doi:10.1109/CSMR-WCRE.2014.6747183. ISBN 978-1-4799-3752-3. S2CID 17927576.
• Decan, Alexandre; Mens, Tom; Claes, Maelick; Grosjean, Philippe (2015-09-07). "On the Development and Distribution of R Packages". Proceedings of the 2015 European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops. ECSAW '15. Dubrovnik, Cavtat, Croatia: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1–6. doi:10.1145/2797433.2797476. ISBN 978-1-4503-3393-1. S2CID 1680582.
• Fox, John (2009). "Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R Project". The R Journal. 1 (2): 5–13. doi:10.32614/RJ-2009-014. ISSN 2073-4859.
• Fox, John; Leanage, Allison (12 September 2016). "R and the Journal of Statistical Software". Journal of Statistical Software. 73 (1): 1–13. doi:10.18637/jss.v073.i02. ISSN 1548-7660.
• Plakidas, Konstantinos; Schall, Daniel; Zdun, Uwe (2017). "Evolution of the R software ecosystem: Metrics, relationships, and their impact on qualities". Journal of Systems and Software. 132: 119–146. doi:10.1016/j.jss.2017.06.095. ISSN 0164-1212.

External links

• The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)
• METACRAN, a directory of R packages
• CRAN Task Views, listing of CRAN packages by topics