romRDS an Read or Make RDS

The romRDS package provides a wrapper that handles assignment of the code's resulting value to an object. The wrapper automatically saves the value in .rds and for later invocations can use this file to skip evaluation. Basically the wrapper either Reads from the disk Or Makes RDS files for later reuse (hence romRDS name). The main motivation is to avoid unnecessary reevaluation of some computationally expensive code chunks (e.g., when your R session crashed and you lost all the objects) and free up from frequent snapshots of the entire environment to the .Rdata.

Usage

## consider some evaluation with subsequent assignment to object
my_object_name <- Sys.sleep(5)

## the above will take 5 sec every time

## the romRDS package provides the romRDS function (its infix equivalent is %<--%)
romRDS("my_object_name", Sys.sleep(5))

## the equivalent of the above in infix form
my_object_name %<--% Sys.sleep(5)

## multiple commands can be wrapped in {} as usual
my_object_name %<--% {
    Sys.sleep(5)
    data.frame(1:10, runif(10))
}

## or you can use R pipes introduced since R v4.0
## note that maggritr pipes probably won't work
my_object_name %<--%
    Sys.sleep(5) |>
    paste0("Sys.sleep returns NULL so prepending it to this string does not change it.")

Installation

devtools::install_github("nil")

By default the package installation does not rely on any dependencies. However, if you need to some additional features (e.g., robust parameters checking and working with STATA's dta files) you need to install it with extra suggested dependencies.

devtools::install_github("nil", dependencies = TRUE)

Dependencies

name	version	comment
R	4.2.0	minimum R version to enable native piping

Hard dependencies (Depends field in DESCRIPTION file)

Suggested packages

name	version	comment
tinytest		for testing
humanFormat		for formatting messages
checkmate		function arguments checker, ensures stability
haven		reads STATA .dta files
data.table		fast data.frames, used as main input and output data type

Suggested packages (Suggests field in the DESCRIPTION file)

name	version	comment
unrar	6.12	RAR archives utility

Suggested system packages

Development dependencies and tools

These packages are used for developing and building romRDS

name	version	comment
devtools		builds the package
roxygen2		makes docs
languageserver		provides some IDE consistency
usethis		repo utils

Useful packages for development