This week in R (2025-02-28)

Happy Friday everyone! Here's some news from the world of R this week:

• Air it out: Davis Vaughan and Lionel Henry have announced a new 'extremely fast R formatter' written in Rust. Air can be integrated with VSCode, Positron and RStudio and although it isn't as configurable as {styler}, the idea behind it being so fast is that it can be used to 'format on save' with no real impact on workflow. You can read the introductory blog post here to understand what it is and why it was developed. It looks like a great new tool and I'll be trying it out in the coming weeks!
• Trophy Case: R 4.4.3 is released today! The new version, named 'Trophy Case', is a minor update which mostly contains bug fixes and no major new features. You can read the full changelog here to see what is new, and can install it yourself from CRAN.
• UseR time wisely: UseR! 2025 conference has extended their submission deadline for proposed talks until March 10th. You can submit to present a 3 hour tutorial, a 15-20 minute talk, a 5 minute lightning talk, or a poster. Read more on their website here.
• The Mat-Rix: R-consortium are hosting a webinar presented by Bruno Rodrigues - creator of the {rix} package for using Nix from within R. Nix is an interesting new framework which aims to increase reproducibility and can be an alternative to Docker, so if you're keen to learn more, sign up for the webinar here.
• Hello Ellmer: Posit have released an article introducing {ellmer} v0.1.1. They give an overview of what {ellmer} is and how you can use it to interact with your favourite LLM provider. Read more about it here.
• Whats new, Mr Kuhn?: Max Kuhn has written a blog post giving an update on the tidymodels ecosystem for Q1 2025. The article highlights some key areas of improvements such as higher quality warning and error messages; some background improvements to parallelism and a new modelling mode in {parsnip}. Read all about it here.

• Quiz:?can you guess the output to each of the lines of code below?

# What is length(x)?
x <- c(list(1, 2), c(2))
length(x)

# What will the output be?
c(1, 2, 3, 4) * c(1, 2)

# What will the output be?
1:5-1

# What will the output be for each of the below?
(TRUE + TRUE) == TRUE
(FALSE + FALSE) == FALSE        

New versions:

• {watcher} v0.1.2 - some updates to the new R binding to 'libsfwatch', which is being integrated into {shiny}, among other things.

• {duckdb} v1.2.0 - bug fixes and features, such as upgrading duckDB version.

I post updates like this every week so if you're interested feel free to follow. Comment below if there's something interesting you found out this week too!