[Rd] R CMD check and CRAN's Rust policy

[Mossa Merhi Reimert]

Dear Simon Urbanek,

There has been very little engagement with the issue I referred to. If it was decided that this “check” ought to be part of the default checks for R,
then that could have been written to us. Either on the bugs.r-project.org or the proposed patch. Before we talk about anything else,
it does seem very strange that we cannot get a reasonable dialogue going.

I would like to say that the R/Rust community has grown substantially. From my end, there are 3 bindings project, extendr, savvy, and roxido.
Then, there are now many rust-based packages on CRAN, see this most recent compiled list https://github.com/nanxstats/r-rust-pkgs.
There is also proof-of-concept https://github.com/r-rust/hellorust that integrates `cargo`, rust’s official build system, with R’s package build system,
and https://github.com/extendr/hellorustc, which showcases how Rust compiler could be directly linked with R’s package system.

 Let me say, that the current R CMD check is not meant to be “helpful”. When a package is built, `cargo` tells the user “Downloading crates”.
Thus, this information is already conveyed to the user.

Personally, I do wish we could debate this requirement further. I do not believe that having R-packages on CRAN vendor rust dependencies
as a good policy. Download statistics is a success metric of a given r-package and rust packages. By insisting on vendoring, and thus
side-stepping `cargo` / crates.io, we are robbing upstream authors of their download-numbers. I do not think such policy is honourable.

While C/C++ do not have official package repositories, it could be thought of, as fair game, to have CRAN act as a pseudo package manager for C/C++ libraries.
I’m not going to argue for or against this part.

There are many objections from the CRAN side to all things related to Rust. I don’t want to open multiple topics in the same thread.
But there is plenty to bring up. And I had hoped we could talk this little issue through, before embarking on a larger discussion.
I do not appreciate the “random demands” comment, as this is not a demand, nor is it random.
I have inquired my end of the community for suggestions
to compile a larger proposal, but then I was afraid that this would be perceived as a big, bulky demand.

Rust is not C/C++/Java, and the support for Rust cannot look like the support for these languages.



From: Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek using R-project.org>
Date: Sunday, 2 March 2025 at 00.39
To: Mossa Merhi Reimert <mossa using sund.ku.dk>
Cc: r-devel using r-project.org <r-devel using r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Rd] R CMD check and CRAN's Rust policy
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Mossa,

the issue you cite is lacking any pertinent information and it's not even clear why it should be an issue. The check is perfectly justified, it just reports whether a package using rust declares this correctly and where it downloads 3rd party content - something that is important to R users in general and not related to CRAN. I don't see how any of this is "prohibitive" it just calls out what the package is already doing.

As discussed before, my hope was that the "R"ust community will mature enough to work on proper support. It is not clear that it happened yet, but once it does it would make sense to talk about support just as we have for C, C++ and Java, so certainly that should be the right discussion. However, it will have to start with some thinking and a proposal on how the associated issues (compiler support, versioning, dependency sources etc.) are to be addressed, as opposed to making random demands. All this has nothing to do with CRAN so the issue you mention seems irrelevant to the progress. Also I'd like to know what are the "challenges embedded in R itself".

Cheers,
Simon


> On Mar 2, 2025, at 8:45 AM, Mossa Merhi Reimert via R-devel <r-devel using r-project.org> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone!
>
> I'm Mossa, I'm one of the maintainers of extendr, an automated generation of bindings project for
> Rust code, for use in R-packages.
>
> I'm writing to you, as R 4.4.3 was just released, and there have not been
> follow-up on an issue important to us. Link to the issue as discussed on r-devel
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2024-October/083666.html
>
> A community member has provided a suggestion to a patch here https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/pull/182, and we have also attempted to bring it up on
> Bugzilla: https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18806
>
> TLDR: Default `R CMD check` uses additional CRAN-specific checks for Rust,
> instead of keeping this behind the --as-cran flag.
>
> I would like to say, that there is a growing interest in Rust within the R community.
> And generally, Rust becoming a widely adopted language within the Python community (including the scientific part of that community). It is time to deal with the
> pain points with using Rust in R.
>
> Therefore, I would kindly ask that we have a dialogue on how to remedy the issue above first, and how we may deal with other issues going forward. There are both challenges embedded in R itself, and the current CRAN policy for Rust is prohibitive.
>
>
>
> Mossa Merhi Reimert
> Postdoctoral Researcher
>
> K�benhavns Universitet
> Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences
> Animal Welfare and Disease Control
> Gr�nneg�rdsvej 8
> 1870 Frederiksberg C
> Denmark
>
> +45 35324135
> mossa using sund.ku.dk<mailto:mossa using sund.ku.dk>
>
>
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