R Observatory: Metrics for RDesk version 1.0.7

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

RDesk

1.0.7Package record

Native Desktop Application Framework

0packages depend

172downloads / year

–test coverage

3/3flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Janakiraman GCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Build native desktop applications for Windows (with future support planned for macOS and Linux) using 'R' and embedded 'webviews'. Provides a robust 'R6'-based event loop, asynchronous background task management via 'mirai' and 'callr', and a native message bridge for seamless 'R'-to-user-interface communication without listening ports or network overhead. Allows 'R' developers to create professional, standalone desktop tools with modern web-based user interfaces while maintaining a pure 'R' backend.

Changes in 1.0.7

New features & hardening

**App Bundling & Runtime Stability**: Hardened build_app() with unified input validation, R runtime version tolerance, and automatic exclusion of build-time header packages (LinkingTo) to avoid missing dependency errors for packages like dplyr and cpp11.
**Process Management & Window Bridging**: Added rdesk_open_window() with robust processx pipes, READY handshakes, and native process lifetime controls.
**Auto-Updater Engine**: Enhanced rdesk_auto_update() with installer invocation, safe temporary staging, and version comparisons.
**Storage Isolation**: Hardened persistent storage paths (%LOCALAPPDATA%, %APPDATA%) with fallback tempdir validation for restricted permission environments.
**IDE & Working Directory Resolution**: Fixed app directory path resolution in Positron and RStudio when sourcing across active editor tabs.
**Cross-Platform Foundation (Preview)**: Core architecture groundwork prepared for future macOS and Linux desktop targets.

Bug fixes

Bundled demo applications now resolve their app directory from the native launcher's R_BUNDLE_ROOT, avoiding startup failures caused by differing R -f and source() call stacks across execution contexts.
Fixed top-level demo logging cleanup to run through tryCatch(..., finally=) rather than calling on.exit() outside a function.

Show all changes in 1.0.7Hide the rest of the changes in 1.0.7

Fixed unique message ID collision under fast sequential IPC test calls.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)

install.packages("RDesk", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("Janakiraman-311/RDesk")

Development version from Janakiraman-311/RDesk. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Health

CRAN checks

3OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 3.2 min · r-devel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK3 OKNow
OK2 OK2026-04-25
NOTE1 OK, 1 NOTE2026-04-11
OK1 OK2026-04-01

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 1.0.7

READMEYes · 536 wordsVignettesYes · 9 · dynamicNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 1.0.7Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 42 (22 internal)
Examples that run: 100%15 run in a plain check (6 of them under a condition)
Exported functions with examples: 75%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 90%
Help pages citing references: 0%

Vignettes (9)

AI Coding Assistant HTML
Architecture HTML
Async & Background Tasks in RDesk HTML
Coming from Shiny HTML
Cookbook HTML
Getting Started with RDesk HTML
High-Performance Asynchronous Processing with mirai HTML
RDesk IPC Message Contract HTML
The Long Road to Native R Desktop Apps - and Why RDesk Changes Everything HTML

How these are measured

Downloads

172

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #25,541 · ~0/day · ~14/mo

RDesk Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

16430 days

16490 days

1721 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

How downloads are counted

Repository

janakiraman-311/rdesk ↗Account: Janakiraman-311

21Stars

0Forks

2Open issues

0Open PRs

1Releases

282Commits

1Commit identities

desktop-appframeworknativerrpackagerstatswebview2windows

282 commits · Last activity 2026-09-04 · +5% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 80%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: not measured
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2026-03-31 · 12026-10-17 · 21

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

10 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 6 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/janakiraman-311/rdesk on 2026-10-22.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Windows

Governance and community (1)

Contributing guide

Docs source (3)

pkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-09-04 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2026-09-04

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

renv

Show all practicesHide 2 practices

CRAN release process (2)

cran-comments.mdCRAN-SUBMISSION

Git structural (1)

.gitattributes

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (2026-10-20)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

19 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing RDesk adds 12 packages (8 with compiled code, 4.0 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: jsonlite 1.0 MB, nanonext 911 KB, cli 629 KB.

Depends (0)

none

Imports (11)

R6 jsonlite digest processx callr mirai base64enc zipstatsutilsparallel

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (11)

testthat withr knitr rmarkdown ggplot2 dplyr broom devtools pkgbuild rstudioapi renv

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (9)

Janakiraman G

Microsoft Corporation

Copyright holder

WebView2 SDK (src/webview2_sdk/)

The Abseil Authors