Rcpp now used by 1500 CRAN packages

Right now Rcpp stands at 1500 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time. What an amazing few days this has been as we also just marked the tenth anniversary and the big one dot oh release.

Rcpp cleared 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I only tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages in March 2016, 700 packages last July 2016, 800 packages last October 2016, 900 packages early January 2017,
1000 packages in April 2017, and 1250 packages in November 2018. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far 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 packages using Rcpp 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 July of 2015, seven percent just before Christmas 2015, eight percent last summer, nine percent mid-December 2016, cracked ten percent in the summer of 2017 and eleven percent this year. We are currently at 11.199 percent or just over one in nine packages. There is more detail in the chart: how CRAN seems to be pushing back more and removing more aggressively (which my CRANberries tracks but not in as much detail as it could), how the growth of Rcpp seems to be slowing somewhat outright and even more so as a proportion of CRAN – just like every growth curve should, eventually. But we leave all that for another time.

1500 user packages is pretty mind-boggling. We can use the progression of CRAN itself compiled by Henrik in a series of posts and emails to the main development mailing list. Not that long ago CRAN itself did not have 1500 packages, and here we are at almost 13400 with Rcpp at 11.2% and still growing (albeit slightly more slowly). Amazeballs.

This puts a whole lot of responsibility on us in the Rcpp team as we continue to keep Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been.

And with that, and as always, 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.