R Observatory: Metrics for protolite version 2.4.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

protolite

2.4.0

Highly Optimized Protocol Buffer Serializers

3packages dependsuggested by 2

91.1Kdownloads / year

68.7%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Jeroen OomsCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Pure C++ implementations for reading and writing several common data formats based on Google protocol-buffers. Currently supports 'rexp.proto' for serialized R objects, 'geobuf.proto' for binary geojson, and 'mvt.proto' for vector tiles. This package uses the auto-generated C++ code by protobuf-compiler, hence the entire serialization is optimized at compile time. The 'RProtoBuf' package on the other hand uses the protobuf runtime library to provide a general- purpose toolkit for reading and writing arbitrary protocol-buffer data in R.

Changes in 2.4.0

Windows: use protobuf from Rtools if available

From NEWS in the release

Install

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

install.packages("protolite", 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("jeroen/protolite")

Development version from jeroen/protolite. 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-protolite

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-protolite

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

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

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 6.1 min · r-devel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-05-02
NOTE12 OK, 2 NOTE2026-04-22
ERROR11 OK, 2 NOTE, 1 ERROR2026-04-18

Show 1 earlier changeHide 1 earlier change

NOTE12 OK, 2 NOTE2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 2.4.0

README· In the repository, left out of the releaseVignettesNoNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 2.4.0Citation fileNoWebsiteYes

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

How these are measured

Downloads

91.1K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #1,581 · ~249/day · ~7.6K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

5K30 days

14.6K90 days

91.1K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on1K r2u14.9K conda_forge530 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

jeroen/protolite ↗Account: jeroen

49Stars

9Forks

7Open issues

0Open PRs

9Releases

216Commits

2Commit identities

216 commits · Last activity 2026-03-10 · 0% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 60%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 4
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 5

Stars over time

2024-09-07 · 482026-07-07 · 49

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

3 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 2 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/jeroen/protolite on 2026-10-11.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

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

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

7 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing protolite adds 2 packages (2 with compiled code, 2.8 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: Rcpp 1.8 MB, jsonlite 1.0 MB.

Depends (0)

none

Imports (2)

Rcpp jsonlite

LinkingTo (1)

Rcpp

Suggests (4)

spelling curl testthat sf

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

3direct

10indirect

Imports 3

Suggested by 2

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

geojson opencpu mapboxapi

Suggests, most downloaded first

rgbif polmineR

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Jeroen Ooms

Author, Maintainer since 1.0 (2016)

Releases (19)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
2.4.0Latest
record
2026-03-12 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
2.3.1
record
2024-10-04 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
2.3.0
record
2023-09-25 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
2.2.0
record
2023-01-29 · diff ↗
2.1.3
record
2022-10-25 · diff ↗
2.1.2
record
2022-10-17 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
2.1.1
record
2021-07-28 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
2.1
record
2020-01-13 · diff ↗
2.0
record
2019-10-10 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
read_mvt_data, read_mvt_sf

Show 15 earlier eventsHide 15 earlier events

1.9
record
2019-07-02 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
1.8
record
2018-06-26 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
1.7
record
2017-09-01 · diff ↗
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
1.6
record
2017-03-16 · diff ↗
1.5
record
2016-09-06 · diff ↗
1.4
record
2016-08-19 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
geobuf2json, json2geobuf, read_geobuf
1.3
record
2016-07-06 · diff ↗
1.2
record
2016-05-08 · diff ↗
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
1.1
record
2016-04-25 · diff ↗
1.0
record
2016-04-23
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16

Package metadata

First published: 2016-04-23
Total releases: 19 / 10 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Download size: 25 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("protolite")

Format

Ooms, J. (2026). protolite: Highly Optimized Protocol Buffer Serializers (Version 2.4.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.protolite

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 protolite version 2.4.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-17. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-17, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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