R Observatory: Metrics for feather version 0.4.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

feather

0.4.0Package record

R Bindings to the Feather 'API'

2packages dependsuggested by 4

521.9Kdownloads / year

66.7%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Hadley WickhamCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Issues ↗

Read and write feather files, a lightweight binary columnar data store designed for maximum speed.

Changes in 0.4.0

This release updates feather to depend on the arrow package, which is where Feather format development has moved. This resolves many bug reports and missing features from the previous implementation of Feather in R, and it brings the R package in line with the Python feather package, which has depended on pyarrow since 2017.

For compatibility, feather::write_feather() uses V1 of the Feather specification: it is a wrapper around arrow::write_feather(version = 1). Feather V2 is just the Arrow format on disk and has support for a much richer set of data types. To switch to V2, we recommend just using arrow::write_feather().

With these changes, most of feather's APIs are preserved in spirit, but there are some noteworthy changes:

The feather class, which allowed for accessing data in a Feather file without reading it all into R, has been replaced by an arrow::Table backed by the memory-mapped Feather file. This should preserve the intent of the original implementation but with much richer functionality. One behavior change that results though is that slicing/extracting from the Table results in another arrow Table, so the data aren't pulled into a data.frame until you as.data.frame() them.
feather_metadata also now does the same.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

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

install.packages("feather", 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("wesm/feather")

Development version from wesm/feather. 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-feather

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-feather

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-feather

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: 1.2 min · r-release-macos-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-05-12
WARNING12 OK, 1 WARNING2026-05-11
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.4.0

READMEYes · 41 wordsVignettesNoNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 0.4.0Citation fileNoWebsitenot declared in DESCRIPTION

Help pages: 3 (1 internal)
Examples that run: 100%1 run in a plain check
Exported functions with examples: 33%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 67%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

521.9K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #773 · ~1.4K/day · ~43.5K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

17.7K30 days

62.9K90 days

521.9K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on3.2K r2u2 autocran10.4K conda_forge196 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

wesm/feather ↗Account: wesm

2,757Stars

164Forks

7Open issues

0Open PRs

3Releases

149Commits

32Commit identities

License file reads as Apache-2.0 · 149 commits · Last activity 2025-12-08 · 0% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 11%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 985
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 8

Stars over time

2025-09-19 · 2,7382026-10-03 · 2,757

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

5 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 3 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/wesm/feather on 2026-10-21.

Continuous integration (1)

Travis CI (config file)

Governance and community (3)

Contributing guideIssue templates

The repository owner accepts GitHub Sponsors

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting (Codecov)

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

4 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing feather adds 15 packages (10 with compiled code, 8.3 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: arrow 4.2 MB, vctrs 1.0 MB, rlang 766 KB.

Depends (0)

none

Imports (1)

arrow

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (3)

hms testthat tibble

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

2direct

0indirect

Imports 2

Suggested by 4

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

D4TAlink.light RWDataPlyr

Suggests, most downloaded first

tidyverse mark ProjectTemplate civis

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (3)

Hadley Wickham

Author, Maintainer since 0.0.1 (2016)

LevelDB Authors

Contributor

RStudio

Copyright holder

Listed in earlier versions (2)

Feather developers

no longer listed · 0.0.1 to 0.3.5

Google

no longer listed · 0.0.1 to 0.3.5

Releases (8)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.4.0Latest
record
2025-12-06 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.3.5
record
2019-09-15 · diff ↗
0.3.4
record
2019-09-03 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.3.3
record
2019-03-27 · diff ↗
0.3.2
record
2019-01-07 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
0.3.1
record
2016-11-09 · diff ↗

Show 3 earlier eventsHide 3 earlier events

0.3.0
record
2016-08-25 · diff ↗
0.0.1
record
2016-05-18
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03

Package metadata

First published: 2016-05-18
Total releases: 8 / 10 yrs
License: Apache License 2.0 OSI
Download size: 8.3 KB

Appears in task views

Numerical Mathematics

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("feather")

Format

Wickham, H., LevelDB Authors, & RStudio. (2025). feather: R Bindings to the Feather 'API' (Version 0.4.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.feather

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 feather version 0.4.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-25. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-25, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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