TL;DR, don’t let your friends use LLMs for finding useless code in a project! Using Jarl instead is cheaper, more reliable, and won’t kill any kitten.

We (Hannah and Maëlle) share an appreciation for the unglamorous maintenance work we call upkeep. So when Claude highlighted some dead code in the tune package to Hannah, it was worth a mention during a chat. This led to Maëlle recommending Etienne Bacher’s Jarl, a fast linter for R written in Rust that can, among other things, detect unused functions.

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In the programming world, laziness can often be a good thing: it is both a human quality that can motivate automation efforts, and a programming concept that avoids wasting resources such as memory. Now, when reading code or documentation, seeing the word “lazy” can be confusing, because of its polisemy: it carries several meanings. In this post, we will enumerate the different possible definitions of “lazy” in R code.

This post was featured on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas.

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After eight years, we are retiring the current version of R-hub, in favor of a better, faster, modern system. We call the new system R-hub v2. R-hub v2 runs R package checks on GitHub Actions. R-hub v2 works best if your R package is in a GitHub repository. This post helps you transition to R-hub v2 from the previous version.

This blog featured a post on mocking, the art of replacing a function with whatever fake we need for testing, years ago. Since then, we’ve entered a new decade, the second edition of Hadley Wickham’s and Jenny Bryan’s R packages book was published, and mocking returned to testthat, so it’s time for a new take/resources roundup!

Thanks a lot to Hannah Frick for useful feedback on this post!

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Does your package need the user to provide secrets, like API tokens, to work? Have you considered telling your package users about the keyring package, or even forcing them to use it?

The keyring package maintained by Gábor Csárdi is a package that accesses the system credential store from R: each operating system has a special place for storing secrets securely, that keyring knows how to interact with. The credential store can hold several keyrings, each keyring can be protected by a specific password and can hold several keys which are the secrets.

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