vcfR
A genomics workhorse whose visible release feed stops dead in mid-2020.
Comparison · Infra & APIs
crandep vs robscale
A side-by-side editorial comparison of crandep and robscale — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:cran
crandep vs robscale: 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 robscale?
A robust-statistics package rewrote its estimators in SIMD C++ and went to CRAN in two weeks.
robscale computes robust scale and location estimators, and its pitch is speed: 21 to 26 times faster than stats::mad, 37 times faster than stats::IQR on small samples, with comparable margins over robustbase for Qn and Sn. The March 2026 releases took it from a GitHub project to a CRAN package carrying eleven estimators, all with confidence intervals.
crandep vs robscale: 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.
robscale
0.0INFRA · APIS
A robust-statistics package rewrote its estimators in SIMD C++ and went to CRAN in two weeks.
◆ Current state
robscale computes robust scale and location estimators, and its pitch is speed: 21 to 26 times faster than stats::mad, 37 times faster than stats::IQR on small samples, with comparable margins over robustbase for Qn and Sn. The March 2026 releases took it from a GitHub project to a CRAN package carrying eleven estimators, all with confidence intervals.
◆ Where it's heading
Three releases in a fortnight walk a clear line: expand the public API, submit to CRAN, then tune. The 0.5.4 work is where that tuning shows, and it is unusually specific about hardware, raising sorting-network thresholds after benchmarking and dropping the AVX-512 path entirely in favour of a shorter AVX2-first dispatch chain. The build-fix lists are long, which is what a package fighting compiler and TBB variation across CRAN's platforms looks like.
◆ Prediction
The dispatch hierarchy has been simplified once already; further releases most likely continue narrowing the SIMD surface and hardening the configure step rather than adding estimators. A new estimator would be the surprise.
Alternatives to crandep and robscale
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 robscale.
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.
ordinalsimr
A Shiny app for choosing the right ordinal test reached CRAN in a single 90-minute burst of tags.
transltr
A new R localization package that reached CRAN and immediately downgraded itself to experimental.
hereR
An R client for HERE's location APIs, shaped almost entirely by what the vendor exposes next.
See all crandep alternatives → · See all robscale alternatives →
Recent activity from crandep and robscale
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 4mo agorobscaleSIMD median networks land; AVX-512 dispatch is dropped
- 4mo agorobscaleCRAN submission ships 11 robust estimators with bootstrap intervals ⚡
- 5mo agorobscalescale_robust() dispatcher and four new estimators join the public API
- 1y agocrandepDependency harvest split in two so orphan packages stop disappearing
- 1y agocrandepTrailing commas in CRAN metadata no longer produce empty-name rows
- 2y agocrandepConstrained two-component mixture with continuity at the threshold
- 2y agocrandepArgument names normalised to x_max; MCMC wrapper defaults set
- 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
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between crandep and robscale?
Both compete on the same themes — cran — within Infra & APIs. crandep and robscale 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 robscale?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. crandep and robscale 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 robscale?
Top robscale alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "robscale alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/robscale for the full list with editorial commentary on each.