R Observatory: Metrics for decimal version 0.1.1

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

decimal

0.1.1Package record

Exact Arbitrary-Precision Decimal Vectors

0packages depend

836downloads / year

42.1%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Pedro BaltazarCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Arbitrary-precision vectors with an exact decimal representation, avoiding the rounding surprises of binary floating point. Built on the 'mpdecimal' C library, arithmetic is governed by an explicit decimal context controlling precision, rounding, and signaling, and vectors integrate with 'vctrs' for use in data frames, 'tibble' objects, summaries, and common numeric workflows. Missing values, signed zeros, infinities, and not-a-number values are supported throughout. The arithmetic model follows Cowlishaw (2009) "General Decimal Arithmetic" https://speleotrove.com/decimal/decarith.html.

Changes in 0.1.1

decimal vectors now convert to and from 'Arrow' decimal arrays directly. as_decimal() gained methods for Array and ChunkedArray. An Arrow decimal column of any width converts exactly, taking its scale from the Arrow type: Arrow's own decimal-to-string cast produces this package's canonical storage form once the exponent letter is folded to lowercase, so the strings need no re-parsing, and a property test guards that invariant. For 1,000,000 decimal128() values that takes 0.27s against 0.78s for casting to string and calling decimal(). Arrow integer columns convert exactly at every width, including int64 and uint64 values a double cannot hold. Other Arrow types convert through the ordinary as_decimal() rules for the equivalent R vector.
A decimal column now becomes an Arrow decimal field in arrow::arrow_table(), arrow::write_parquet() and arrow::write_dataset(). The field is an Arrow extension type whose storage is a real decimal128() or decimal256(), so Spark, DuckDB, pandas and other readers see a plain decimal column, while in R it returns as a decimal vector on every read path: as.data.frame(), arrow::read_parquet() and dplyr::collect() included. New arrow_decimal_type() pins a precision and scale for a column that will be appended to. Infinities and NaNs, which no Arrow decimal can represent, now raise an error on conversion instead of round-tripping through the 'vctrs' extension type; keep such a column as a string if you need them.

Show all changes in 0.1.1Hide the rest of the changes in 0.1.1

Arrow's compute engine does not operate on extension columns. For arrow-side arithmetic or filtering on a decimal column, write a plain field by passing a plain Arrow decimal type to arrow::as_arrow_array() or by setting options(decimal.arrow_extension = FALSE). A plain field comes back from arrow's own conversion as a double wearing the decimal class, because arrow reapplies the column's recorded R attributes; format() and as.character() now refuse such an object rather than print rounded values. New arrow_as_data_frame() converts an Arrow Table or RecordBatch to a data frame, reading plain decimal fields, including those in files written by other systems, as decimal vectors, and leaving every other column to arrow.
Fixed memory leaks on the error paths of the native kernels. An R error raised while an mpd_t was allocated abandoned it, because R's error handling unwinds past the code that would have freed it. Parsing an invalid decimal string leaked every handle the operation held, and an allocation failure part-way through setting up an operation leaked the handles already allocated. An R allocation failure while storing a result string leaked the formatted text too; that text is now released under R_UnwindProtect().
summary() now works on decimal vectors. It reports the same six statistics as [summary.default()] plus an NA's count, computed in decimal arithmetic and returned as a decimal vector, so figures that a double would round are preserved. Quartiles use the type 7 definition, matching stats::quantile().
Fixed is.na(), is.nan(), is.infinite(), is_qnan() and is_snan() returning malformed logical vectors. They forwarded mpdecimal's flag bits -- 4 for NaN, 8 for sNaN, 2 for Infinity -- instead of TRUE. The results printed correctly and compared equal with ==, but which() found no matching elements, sum() over-counted, and identical() was false against the obvious expectation.
DESCRIPTION now declares URL and BugReports, so the CRAN page links to the source repository and the issue tracker.
Building a decimal vector from character is substantially faster. The fractional-digit scan that decimal() performs on every element moved from R to C, which for 100,000 values takes construction from 1.13s to 0.05s when scale is supplied (about 22x) and from 2.28s to 0.05s when it is inferred (about 45x). Inferring the scale now costs the same as supplying it. This matters most when loading decimal data from 'Arrow' or a database, where the values arrive as a character vector in one call.
New vignette vignette("arrow-decimal-types"), covering lossless conversion between decimal vectors and Arrow's decimal128() / decimal256() types in both directions, including chunked arrays, Parquet columns, and the cases Arrow decimals cannot represent.
format() on a decimal vector now accepts the extra arguments that table printers pass to every column, such as digits, na.encode and justify from format.data.frame(), timezone from 'data.table' and trim from knitr::kable(), so decimal columns print inside a base data.frame, a data.table and a kable() table. The arguments are ignored rather than honored, so an exact value is never silently rounded for display. Arguments that would change how a number is written, such as nsmall, scientific and big.mark, are an error.
Fixed rbind() on data frames with decimal columns, which always failed with "Can't assign to elements past the end". Assigning past the end of a decimal vector now grows it with missing values, as it does a base vector, and binding columns of different scales takes the finer one. x[] <- value now replaces every element instead of failing.
match(), %in% and base merge() now compare decimal values rather than their stored text, so 2.5 matches 2.50, as == already said. Whole numbers still match integers and strings: decimal("20") %in% 20L stays TRUE.
New section in vignette("decimal-values") on decimal columns in a 'data.table': what works, and workarounds for the operations data.table runs on the stored text instead of the values, such as sorting and grouped min() and max().

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("decimal", 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("pedrobtz/decimal")

Development version from pedrobtz/decimal. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-decimal

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-decimal

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-decimal

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 3.0 min · r-devel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OKNow
OK7 OK2026-08-25

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.1.1

READMEYes · 404 wordsVignettesYes · 3 · evaluation depends on the environmentNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 0.1.1Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 31 (2 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 100%29 run in a plain check (2 of them under a condition)
Exported functions with examples: 100%
Documented parameters: 91%
Return-value docs: 100%
Help pages citing references: 0%

Vignettes (3)

How these are measured

Downloads

836

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #13,941 · ~2/day · ~70/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

52630 days

83690 days

8361 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on37 r2u6 autocran

How downloads are counted

Repository

pedrobtz/decimal ↗Account: pedrobtz

3Stars

0Forks

3Open issues

1Open PRs

2Releases

68Commits

3Commit identities

68 commits · Last activity 2026-09-25 · Default branch at 0.1.1.9000, ahead of CRAN 0.1.1 (checked 2026-10-18)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 94%
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

2026-09-24 · 02026-09-30 · 3

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

7 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 4 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/pedrobtz/decimal on 2026-10-18.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Docs source (3)

pkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-09-25 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2026-09-23

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

AI coding toolsBeta

This repository shows signs of AI coding tools.

Claude Codefirst seen 2026-06-27
Seen in the repository: CLAUDE.md
Named in .Rbuildignore: .claude, CLAUDE.md
Pull request it wrote: opened by a project member
Commits: 1 by its own account · at least 36 crediting it in the message

Shared conventions any agent may read, so they name no particular tool.

Seen in the repository: .agents, AGENTS.md

Models named in its commits

Claude Opus 514 commits · Sep 2026
Claude Opus 5.514 commits · Sep 2026
Claude Fable 5.18 commits · Sep 2026

Counts are commits, not lines of code. Commits by a tool's accounts count once across all of its accounts. Commits crediting it are the largest count among its credit lines, a minimum.How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (updated 2026-09-27)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

13 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing decimal adds 6 packages (4 with compiled code, 2.7 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: vctrs 1.0 MB, rlang 766 KB, cli 629 KB.

Depends (1)

R >= 4.2.0

Imports (4)

methodsrlang vctrs withr

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (10)

arrow covr data.table dplyr knitr pillar R6 rmarkdown tibble testthat

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (2)

Pedro Baltazar

Stefan Krah

Contributor, Copyright holder

Vendored 'mpdecimal' library in src/mpdecimal; see inst/COPYRIGHTS.

Releases (2)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

0.1.1Latest
record
2026-09-23 · current release · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
arrow_as_data_frame, arrow_decimal_type
0.1.0
record
2026-08-24
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2026-08-24
Total releases: 2 / 1 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.2.0
Download size: 197 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("decimal")

Format

Baltazar, P., & Krah, S. (2026). decimal: Exact Arbitrary-Precision Decimal Vectors (Version 0.1.1) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.decimal

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for decimal version 0.1.1 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-21. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-21, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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