STAT 447 (2026) Guest Lecture by Vincent Arel-Bundock YouTube video by Dirk Eddelbuettel

The great @eddelbuettel.com invited me to his STAT447 class at the University of Illinois.

If you'd like to hear me speak about the interpretation of statistical models in #RStats, using the {marginaleffects} 📦, check out the video!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3TX...

Screenshot of a macOS Electron window titled "Python Shiny Demo Suite" showing a launcher screen with three app cards: Dashboard (analytics overview with live-updating stats and charts), Data Explorer (browse and analyze built-in datasets), and About (system information and runtime details), each labeled PY-SHINY. A terminal window behind it shows npm dependencies being installed and the Electron app starting in development mode.

Screenshot of a macOS Electron window showing a Python Shiny Dashboard app with four colored summary cards (Active Users 397, Revenue $41,648, Sessions 3,967, Conversion 38%), a revenue trend line chart with a time range slider, and a breakdown bar chart showing Organic, Paid, and Referral traffic. A terminal behind it shows Python Shiny server logs.

Screenshot of a Windows 11 desktop showing both the Python Shiny Demo Suite and R Shiny Demo Suite running side by side as Electron apps, each displaying a launcher screen with three app cards: Dashboard, Data Explorer, and About. Two PowerShell terminals behind them show the build and startup logs for each suite.

Screenshot of a Windows 11 desktop showing two Electron apps side by side, each displaying an About page. The top app shows a Python Shiny system backend running Python 3.13.7 on Windows with ARM64 architecture. The bottom app shows an R Shiny system backend running R 4.5.3 on Windows 10 x64 with x86-64 architecture. An Apps menu is open on the R app showing a "Back to Launcher" option. Two PowerShell terminals behind them show server startup logs.

Turns out you can fit more than one #Shiny app in an #Electron shell. We gave it three and a launcher screen. R and Python. macOS and Windows. It's a clown car at this point. We keep opening the door and another app gets out.

#rstats #python

Screenshot of a Windows 11 desktop tiled with eight windows, each running the same Shiny dashboard inside an Electron app under a different runtime configuration. Every window shows four colored summary cards at the top (Backend or Runtime, R or Python version, Platform, and Packages or Arch) above an Interactive Plot with a slider and scatter chart, plus a Runtime Details panel. The eight variants pair R Shiny and Python Shiny with four packaging strategies, shinylive, system install, auto-download, and bundled runtime, running on Windows across Emscripten/wasm32, x86-64, and ARM64 architectures, demonstrating that the same Shiny app can be shipped as a Windows desktop application through any of these modes. A PowerShell terminal is visible at the bottom of the screen showing the commands used to launch each Electron app.

Screenshot of a Windows 11 desktop running inside a macOS window, showing a PowerShell terminal mid-build. The terminal output shows R packages being unpacked (sourcetools, withr, xtable, Rcpp, magrittr), an embedded R runtime being processed, Electron templates being prepared, and npm dependencies being installed. Near the bottom, the log lists available build scripts for multiple platforms and shows an Electron app build for win-x64 in progress at 83 percent with an ETA of 11 seconds.

Holy (native) Grail update, Windows edition: the #Shiny map leads to #Electron desktop apps on Windows 11. #rstats and #python running in shinylive, system, auto-download, and bundled modes, all from one R package. (Container mode sat this one out, VM-in-a-VM said no.)

Coming soon (tm)

Screenshot of the announcement by Simon Urbanek regarding Tomáš Kalibera’s untimely passing. It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Tomáš Kalibera on 1 April, a valuable member of the R core team for close to 10 years and a good friend, after a short but aggressive illness. Tomáš brought in fresh perspective and knowledge, enabling him to improve many aspects of R, including performance and reliability. He created many tools aimed at aiding package authors to make their packages more reliable, and was instrumental in modernizing the Windows build of R. He was an active member of CRAN and the R community, providing help to package authors, and he was the most prolific writer on the R core blog. He will be remembered for his profound contributions to R by millions of users. He is survived by his wife and 1 year old son. A full obituary will be posted in due time. Respectfully, Simon Urbanek

RIP Tomáš Kalibera. #rstats lost a huge contributor today. Condolences to his young family.

stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-...

Screenshot of the webR assembly playground for the litedown package showing an Rmd document being 'fused' in browser to show a rendered HTML page mirroring what would be present if rmarkdown or quarto were used locally to render a page (albeit with different styles).

Localized package playgrounds is a cool idea. Easier to reach for than inlining webR on pkgdown examples & litedown::fuse() makes it sing.

Impressive to see an Rmd be rendered in a WebAssembly world where pandoc-based Quarto/rmarkdown would be highly problematic.

pkg.yihui.org/litedown/pla...

Guy I’m sponsoring very quietly releases #rstats package I’ve been wanting for the last couple of years.

pkg.yihui.org/gglite/doc/g...

Guess he shut up and took my money. 🤣🤣🤣

Wrote up the details on how this works under the hood, including how R discovers Rtools through RTOOLS{VER}_HOME and how to point any R installation at a custom Rtools location.

Blog post: blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/portab...

Screenshot of a Mac desktop tiled with eight windows, each running the same Shiny dashboard inside an Electron app under a different runtime configuration. Every window shows four colored summary cards at the top (Backend/Runtime, R or Python Version, Platform, and Packages) above an Interactive Plot with a slider and scatter chart, plus a Runtime Details panel underneath. The eight variants pair R Shiny and Python Shiny with different packaging strategies, shinylive, system install, bundled runtime, auto-download, and container, running across Darwin/arm64, Linux, and Emscripten/wasm32 architectures, demonstrating that the same Shiny app can be shipped as a desktop application through any of these modes.

Holy (native) Grail update: we cracked open the #Shiny temple and eight desktop apps tumbled out. #rstats, #python, native, containerized, shinylive, you name it. One #Electron shell, every runtime mode we could dream up, all from one R package.

{shinyelectron}, coming soon to a desktop near you.

Windows 11 desktop showing three windows: a PowerShell terminal compiling the Rcpp package from source using g++ from the bundled Rtools45 toolchain, a File Explorer window showing the portable-r-4.5.3-win-x64-full directory containing R files alongside an rtools45 folder, and a second Explorer window showing the library folder with Rcpp and other installed packages.

Portable #Rstats for #Windows now ships with Rtools built in. Extract, compile from source, done. No installers, no PATH wrangling, no registry. Just R + gcc in a folder. So, running:

install.packages("Rcpp", type="source")

Now, works out of the box!

github.com/portable-r/portable-r-windows

Screenshot of the CRAN package page for shinylive on cran.rstudio.com. The page reads: "Package 'shinylive' was removed from the CRAN repository. Formerly available versions can be obtained from the archive. Archived on 2026-04-06 for policy violation."

Screenshot of the GitHub commits page for posit-dev/r-shinylive on the main branch. Recent commits on Apr 6, 2026 include "ci: Add R CMD check job with TEST_ASSETS enabled (#187)" and "fix: Skip tests that touch cache dir on CRAN (#186)", both by schloerke and claude. Earlier commits on Mar 31, 2026 show "Increment version number to 0.4.0.9000", "release: v0.4.0 (#184)", and "chore: 2026 upkeep (#182)".

Welp, went to install the #rshinylive #rstats package today and CRAN archived it for a "policy violation" about a week after posit shipped v0.4.0. looks like they're already on the fix, but oof. Farewell for now little buddy...

If you're building a tool that needs R under the hood, you can't ask users to install R themselves. You need to just grab it and run it. Right now there's no good way to do that on macOS or Windows. Python has this (python-build-standalone, it's how uv works), R doesn't. That's really what this is.

blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/programming/...

A macOS desktop showing two windows side by side. On the left, a Finder window displays the contents of a "portable-r-4.5.3-macos-arm64" folder, with a directory tree expanded under "library" revealing subfolders like base, boot, class, cluster, codetools, compiler, datasets, foreign, graphics, grDevices, grid, and jsonlite (which is expanded to show CITATION, DESCRIPTION, doc, help, and html items). On the right, a Terminal window (zsh shell) shows commands for downloading and extracting Portable R 4.5.3 for macOS ARM64 from GitHub using curl, verifying the R home directory with Rscript, and installing the jsonlite package. The terminal output confirms jsonlite was successfully downloaded (1.1 MB) and installed, with the final line printing {"portable":true} to verify the portable configuration is working.

Making #rstats portable on #macOS has been the community's Sisyphean boulder since 2009.

Now, download a tar.gz, extract, run from:

github.com/portable-r/p...

Signed, notarized, 4.3.0 - 4.5.3.

Blog: blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/programming/...

Also shipping experimental ARM64 builds for R 4.4.0 - 4.5.2, tested natively on GitHub Actions' windows-11-arm runners. Though, no CRAN ARM64 binaries yet. So, can't easily install packages without getting the companion RTools 4.5 (not included).

Background: blog.r-project.org/2024/04/23/r...

Screenshot of a Windows 11 desktop showing portable R in action. A PowerShell terminal displays the full workflow: curl downloading the portable-r-4.5.3-win-x64.zip from GitHub, tar extracting it, R.home() returning C:/Users/ronin/Desktop/portable-r-4.5.3-win-x64, and install.packages successfully installing jsonlite with the output {"works":[true]}. Behind the terminal, two File Explorer windows show the portable-r-4.5.3-win-x64 folder on the Desktop alongside the zip file, and a second Explorer window browsing the library subfolder where the jsonlite package folder is highlighted among 31 installed packages.

Need #rstats on a #Windows machine where you can't run an installer? Locked-down workstation, USB drive, embedded app?

It's 2026. You just need a URL:

github.com/portable-r/p...

R 4.3.0 - 4.5.3, x64 + ARM64. install.packages() works.

Blog: blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/programming/...

Screenshot of a Parallels Windows VM showing shinyelectron output for a Native Shiny for Python App on Windows 11.

Yeah, we’re finally chasing the Holy (native) Grail...

r-mailing-lists r-mailing-lists has 34 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

Thanks! PHP + CSS with MySQL DB on the backend. The data and parser are open at github.com/r-mailing-li.... The viewer is closed source since it's running on personal resources.

r-mailing-lists r-mailing-lists has 34 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

Thanks! It's a PHP + CSS site backed by a MySQL DB. The viewer itself is closed source since it's on personal infrastructure, but the data pipeline and Rust parser are open: github.com/r-mailing-li...

Screenshot from the R contributors slack with the GitHub repo being discussed.

Screenshot of our project’s about page, where we have a link out to the GitHub repo.

Yes, we acknowledged the prior project and the creator even gave us kudos for this setup. Though, the GH repo search has its limitations on the archive.

Thanks for the kind words!

Sure. For 20mb, maybe just the contributors data?(data/contributors.parquet) with a stretch being threads? (data/threads.parquet) Though, there are definitely ‘eras’ to the list that become more prominent.

Contributor profile page for Brian Ripley on the R Mailing List Archives, showing 17,941 messages from June 1998 to March 2026. A stacked bar chart displays activity over time peaking around 2003 to 2006, with a breakdown table showing 11,715 messages on R-help (65.3%) and 5,495 on R-devel (30.6%) across 10 lists.

17,941 and counting. The archive has a contributor page for every poster, complete with activity over time and a breakdown by list. Prof Ripley's peak years were roughly 2002 to 2008, with R-help and R-devel making up over 95% of his messages.
r-mailing-lists.thecoatlessprofessor.com/contributors...

If you've ever wished you could grep through R-help, find that one Brian Ripley reply about CRAN policy from 2009, or just see who the top contributors to R-SIG-Finance were... now you can.

Blog post with all the details: blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/r-mail...

The GitHub data repository README showing R and Python code snippets for reading Parquet files, followed by a data overview table listing all 31 mailing lists with message counts, author counts, and date ranges. R-help leads with 398,517 messages dating back to April 1997.

Want to do your own analysis? The full archive is available as Apache Parquet files, updated nightly via GitHub Actions.

One-liner to load any list in #rstats or #Python. No cloning required.

github.com/r-mailing-li...

A thread view on the R Mailing List Archives showing a message titled "macos 26 considerations" from March 2026 on the R-SIG-Mac list, with replies from Simon Urbanek, Brian Ripley, Gabor Csardi, and Peter Dalgaard visible in the thread panel below.

Every message is parsed, threaded, and indexed. You can browse threads, see who replied to whom, and actually follow conversations that shaped the language.

Here's a recent R-SIG-Mac thread about macOS 26:

r-mailing-lists.thecoatlessprofessor.com/lists/r-sig-...

Homepage of the R Mailing List Archives showing a search bar, three popular lists (R-help with 398,500 messages, R-devel with 63,425, and R-package-devel with 12,125), and a full directory of core lists and special interest groups.

29 years of #rstats community knowledge was sitting in hard-to-search pipermail archives. So I built a more modern home for it.

Introducing the R Mailing List Archives: 631,000+ messages from 32 lists, fully searchable and available as open data.

r-mailing-lists.thecoatlessprofessor.com

#rstats 4.6.0 "Happy Hop" scheduled for April 24. Full schedule on developer.r-project.org (or the svn if you're impatient.)

Just a little bumpy at start; thanks for giving it a shot Daniel!

webRoid requires Android 15 (API level 35) or later. You can check your Android version in your device’s Settings > About Phone > Android Version.

Hi Johannes, please try v1.0.1. This should be rolled out in full now from the Play Store. Again, my apologies for the initial trouble.