Building Rust based R Packages

Welcome back! This afternoon we put the morning’s Rust to work by building a real R package powered by Rust.

We’ll create a package called {rurl}—R bindings to the url crate—so we can parse, inspect, and modify URLs at the speed of Rust while feeling completely at home in R.

The morning workshop ended on a Point struct with a few methods. We pick up right there: our first two warm-up exercises port that work across the FFI boundary before we touch the url crate.

Timeline

This is the conservative timeline for the workshop. The first hour is the most “lesson”-heavy. Once we start building {rurls} it’s almost entirely hands-on.

Section	Duration	End time
Foreign Function Interfaces (FFI)	0:10	1:40 PM
What is extendr?	0:10	1:50 PM
Workshop Scope	0:05	1:55 PM
Hello, world!	0:10	2:05 PM
Package structure	0:10	2:15 PM
Developer Experience	0:10	2:25 PM
Break	0:05	2:30 PM
Adding the url crate	0:05	2:35 PM
R’s Type System	0:10	2:45 PM
New types	0:10	2:55 PM
External pointers	0:10	3:05 PM
Vectorization	0:10	3:15 PM
NA handling	0:10	3:25 PM
A print helper	0:05	3:30 PM
Break	0:05	3:35 PM
Integrating with {vctrs}	0:10	3:45 PM
Accessing Struct Methods from R	0:10	3:55 PM
Modifying an Option<T>	0:05	4:00 PM
🐮 CoWs and Modifying in place	0:10	4:10 PM
Combining iterators	0:10	4:20 PM
Recycling & errors	0:10	4:30 PM