Rcpp now used by 600 CRAN packages

Earlier this morning, Rcpp reached another milestone: 600 packages on CRAN now depend on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo declarations). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage over time.

Rcpp cleared 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June of last year (when I only tweeted about it) and then 500 packages in late October. The chart now extends to the very beginning as I manually compiled some more data from the CRANberries checked with crandb. Then next part uses manually saved entries, and the final and largest part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A list of user package is kept on this page.

Also displayed in the graph is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using Rcpp. The four per-cent hurdle was cleared just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. We passed five percent in December of 2014, six percent last July, seven percent just before Christmas and now stands at 7.31 percent, or a little less than one in thirteen R packages.

600 user packages is truly humbling, a staggering number and a big responsibility. We continue to try our best try to keep Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been so that the next set of packages can rely on it—just like these 600 do.

So with that a very big Thank You! to all users and contributors of Rcpp for help, suggestions, bug reports, documentation or, of course, code.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.