21  Workshop Scope

TipObjective

Define the scope and objective of the workshop.

There’s no better way to learn than by doing.

In this workshop we will create a Rust-powered R package by building a new package called {rurl}.

The {rurl} package provides R bindings to the url crate—one of the most downloaded rust crates of all time.

We’ll touch on:

• Advanced R topics
• Fundamental Rust concepts
• Approaches for ergonomics

As much as this is about Rust, we are also working within the confines of R and thus, the two are inextricably linked.

Why URLs?

The Url crate has a bit of almost everything:

• associated methods
• mutable methods
• errors
• iterators

The deceptively complex string—i.e. https://user@example.com:8080/path/to/page?q=rust#section–contains a scheme, host, port, path, query, and fragment.

Parsing urls correctly is a touch thing to do! A great place for Rust’s type system.

The R package

The {rurl} package we build will let us:

• parse character vectors of URLs into Url structs
• create a {vctrs} compatible vector
• extract components (host, scheme, path, port, query)
• join, modify, and decompose URLs