R Package Compilation for CRAN

[iblacksand]

Currently, CRAN does not support pre-compiled binaries to be shipped with R packages. One issue this will cause for us is users will have to have the rust toolchain installed, so the library can be built on the user's machine. This probably isn't something they will have already installed, so users will have to download the toolchain first.

One solution is to not use CRAN. For example, r-polars uses r-universe, where they can provide pre-compiled binaries.

The easiest solution for our end, is to just require the user to install the Rust SDK, but that may be outside the scope for some users. r-universe may be a good alternative for people who don't want to have to download Rust, and CRAN can be used by people who don't want to download precompiled binaries.

[iblacksand]

If we want users to compile the source code themselves, CRAN would also like to have the packages the library depends on not be downloading via cargo (rust package manager), but provided with the package. This can be done by running cargo vendor. The total folder size is about 200 MB, which goes down to 20 MB when tar.gz'ed.

[iblacksand]

Another issue with providing pre-compiled binaries, is that we would need to build one for every platform. This can be done with CI, but does require slightly more work.

[iblacksand]

Notes on how to package the Rust source code is provided here: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/using_rust.html. It is supported, but would probably require us to tar.gz the results of cargo vendor and require users to install cargo and rustc.

This would be a breaking change for users and when they try to update the R package, we would need to create a message that instructs them to install Rust.

[iblacksand]

https://github.com/yutannihilation/string2path is an example of a package that is on CRAN using Rust