Traefik
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Comparison · Infra & APIs
crandep vs funcharts
A side-by-side editorial comparison of crandep and funcharts — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
crandep vs funcharts: at a glance
What is crandep?
Half CRAN dependency scraper, half extreme-value modelling kit — and the scraper half keeps finding bugs.
crandep does two jobs that rarely share a package: it harvests the CRAN dependency network, and it fits power-law and extreme-value mixture models to the resulting degree distributions. The 2024 releases were all model work — profile posteriors, wrappers, a constrained variant, a TZP-power-law mixture between the two- and three-component models. The 2025 releases are entirely the other half, fixing what the harvester was silently getting wrong.
What is funcharts?
One paper, one release: the functional control chart package ships methods as they get published.
funcharts implements control charts for functional data — statistical process control where each observation is a curve rather than a number. Its release cadence maps one-to-one onto its authors' publication record: 1.4.0 delivered the robust multivariate framework from Capezza et al. (2022), 1.7.0 the adaptive chart from Centofanti et al. (2025) as it was accepted at Technometrics. Each release adds Phase I and Phase II functions for one named method.
crandep vs funcharts: editorial side-by-side
crandep
0.0INFRA · APIS
Half CRAN dependency scraper, half extreme-value modelling kit — and the scraper half keeps finding bugs.
◆ Current state
crandep does two jobs that rarely share a package: it harvests the CRAN dependency network, and it fits power-law and extreme-value mixture models to the resulting degree distributions. The 2024 releases were all model work — profile posteriors, wrappers, a constrained variant, a TZP-power-law mixture between the two- and three-component models. The 2025 releases are entirely the other half, fixing what the harvester was silently getting wrong.
◆ Where it's heading
The modelling side has settled into a family of mixtures with matching wrapper and profile-posterior functions, and has not gained a new component since mid-2024. Attention has shifted to data quality in the scraper, where two consecutive releases dealt with the same class of problem: rows that should not exist because of trailing commas in CRAN's own metadata, and rows that should exist but did not because orphan packages have no edges. For a package whose science is degree distributions, missing isolated nodes is a modelling error, not a formatting one.
◆ Prediction
Expect further hardening against CRAN metadata quirks in the harvesting functions; the mixture-model side looks feature-complete and is likely to stay quiet unless a new component model is published.
funcharts
0.0INFRA · APIS
One paper, one release: the functional control chart package ships methods as they get published.
◆ Current state
funcharts implements control charts for functional data — statistical process control where each observation is a curve rather than a number. Its release cadence maps one-to-one onto its authors' publication record: 1.4.0 delivered the robust multivariate framework from Capezza et al. (2022), 1.7.0 the adaptive chart from Centofanti et al. (2025) as it was accepted at Technometrics. Each release adds Phase I and Phase II functions for one named method.
◆ Where it's heading
The early releases were about the package as software — vectorised tensor products, precomputed B-spline inner products, faster cross-validation — and about removing assumptions, most consequentially the assumption that functional data is represented in a B-spline basis. Since 1.4.0 the software work has stopped and the package has become a delivery vehicle for the research group's methods. Robustness came first, adaptivity second, both arriving with the paper rather than ahead of it.
◆ Prediction
The next release will most likely implement whatever this group publishes next, following the same Phase I / Phase II function pairing; nothing in the feed suggests infrastructure work resuming.
Alternatives to crandep and funcharts
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either crandep or funcharts.
NGINX
nginx returns to feature work with PROXY v2 upstream writes, and quietly adds JSON to core.
ESPHome
ESPHome closes the 2026.8 cycle, but the release body is a bare link to the real notes.
vcfR
A genomics workhorse whose visible release feed stops dead in mid-2020.
dialr
The R phone-number package stopped only parsing numbers and started asking them where they are.
ggVennDiagram
A Venn diagram package whose public release notes say almost nothing — including about its copyright cleanup.
See all crandep alternatives → · See all funcharts alternatives →
Recent activity from crandep and funcharts
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1y agocrandepDependency harvest split in two so orphan packages stop disappearing
- 1y agocrandepTrailing commas in CRAN metadata no longer produce empty-name rows
- 1y agofunchartsAdaptive multivariate functional control chart added
- 2y agocrandepConstrained two-component mixture with continuity at the threshold
- 2y agocrandepArgument names normalised to x_max; MCMC wrapper defaults set
- 2y agofunchartsRobust multivariate framework: filtering, imputation, and both phases
- 2y agocrandepTZP-power-law mixture fills the gap between the 2- and 3-component models
- 2y agocrandepProfile posteriors and chained MCMC wrappers for the mixture models
- 3y agofunchartsAll fda basis systems accepted, not just B-splines ⚡
- 3y agofunchartsVectorised inner products and cross-validation, seed argument dropped
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between crandep and funcharts?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Infra & APIs. crandep and funcharts are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is crandep better than funcharts?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. crandep and funcharts are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to crandep?
Top crandep alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "crandep alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/crandep for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to funcharts?
Top funcharts alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "funcharts alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/funcharts for the full list with editorial commentary on each.