S3 Methods Simplified

Methods that simplify the setup of S3 generic functions and S3 methods. Major effort has been made in making definition of methods as simple as possible with a minimum of maintenance for package developers. For example, generic functions are created automatically, if missing, and naming conflict are automatically solved, if possible. The method setMethodS3() is a good start for those who in the future may want to migrate to S4. This is a cross-platform package implemented in pure R that generates standard S3 methods.

R Object-Oriented Programming with or without References

Methods and classes for object-oriented programming in R with or without references. Large effort has been made on making definition of methods as simple as possible with a minimum of maintenance for package developers. The package has been developed since 2001 and is now considered very stable. This is a cross-platform package implemented in pure R that defines standard S3 classes without any tricks.

Fast and Light-Weight Caching (Memoization) of Objects and Results to Speed Up Computations

Memoization can be used to speed up repetitive and computational expensive function calls. The first time a function that implements memoization is called the results are stored in a cache memory. The next time the function is called with the same set of parameters, the results are momentarily retrieved from the cache avoiding repeating the calculations. With this package, any R object can be cached in a key-value storage where the key can be an arbitrary set of R objects. The cache memory is persistent (on the file system).

Identify Global Objects in R Expressions

Identifies global ("unknown" or "free") objects in R expressions by code inspection using various strategies (ordered, liberal, or conservative). The objective of this package is to make it as simple as possible to identify global objects for the purpose of exporting them in parallel, distributed compute environments.

Read and Write MAT Files and Call MATLAB from Within R

Methods readMat() and writeMat() for reading and writing MAT files. For user with MATLAB v6 or newer installed (either locally or on a remote host), the package also provides methods for controlling MATLAB (trademark) via R and sending and retrieving data between R and MATLAB.

Environments Behaving (Almost) as Lists

List environments are environments that have list-like properties. For instance, the elements of a list environment are ordered and can be accessed and iterated over using index subsetting, e.g. 'x <- listenv(a = 1, b = 2); for (i in seq_along(x)) x[[i]] <- x[[i]] ^ 2; y <- as.list(x)'.

Unified Handling of Graphics Devices

Functions for creating plots and image files in a unified way regardless of output format (EPS, PDF, PNG, SVG, TIFF, WMF, etc.). Default device options as well as scales and aspect ratios are controlled in a uniform way across all device types. Switching output format requires minimal changes in code. This package is ideal for large-scale batch processing, because it will never leave open graphics devices or incomplete image files behind, even on errors or user interrupts.

A Future API for Parallel Processing using 'callr'

Implementation of the Future API on top of the 'callr' package. This allows you to process futures, as defined by the 'future' package, in parallel out of the box, on your local (Linux, macOS, Windows, ...) machine. Contrary to backends relying on the 'parallel' package (e.g. 'future::multisession') and socket connections, the 'callr' backend provided here can run more than 125 parallel R processes.

Easy Handling of and Access to Files Organized in Structured Directories

A file set refers to a set of files located in one or more directories on the file system. This package provides classes and methods to locate, setup, subset, navigate and iterate such sets. The API is designed such that these classes can be extended via inheritance to provide a richer API for special file formats. Moreover, a specific name format is defined such that filenames and directories can be considered to have full names which consists of a name followed by comma-separated tags. This adds additional flexibility to identify file sets and individual files. NOTE: This package's API should be considered to be in an beta stage. Its main purpose is currently to support the aroma.* packages, where it is one of the main core components; if you decide to build on top of this package, please contact the author first.

A Future API for Parallel and Distributed Processing using 'batchtools'

Implementation of the Future API on top of the 'batchtools' package. This allows you to process futures, as defined by the 'future' package, in parallel out of the box, not only on your local machine or ad-hoc cluster of machines, but also via high-performance compute ('HPC') job schedulers such as 'LSF', 'OpenLava', 'Slurm', 'SGE', and 'TORQUE' / 'PBS', e.g. 'y <- future.apply::future_lapply(files, FUN = process)'.