[sammm]

I started at a company using Shiny for their applications and R as part of their data pipelines.

A huge pain point for us is the packaging system. It is absolutely awful. Packages constantly get overridden so we have to install packages in a specific order. Whenever I have reached out to the community (including prominent members, which have written R books) I have always been told to just use the latest version of all packages and just get on with it, which as anybody knows, isn’t always possible, especially as there are constantly breaking API changes.

I understand R’s history and that in general, it is a lot better than it use to be, but I would only recommend R is used for notebook style work and to keep it well away from production.

We have migrated to Python, which isn’t perfect, but the difference in logging and packaging has been night and day.

[truculent]

I have also found R in production to be a nightmare. On packaging, the renv package seems to be the new way to try to manage things. It’s not perfect but seems to be a step up on what was around before. Have you tried it out at all?

[sammm]

I haven’t, thank you for the suggestion. I will give it a go.

[wodenokoto]

At my old work we would “freeze” CRAN, by downloading a complete dump of everything and setup R to install from that version instead of the online version as a way of version controlling packages.

So instead of defining our app to use version 1.4.5 of a package, we would use “latest version from 3rd of May”.

[amelius]

Same experience here.

A lot of packages/functionality are not available in Python, however.