Deprecate the use of purrr

[dajmcdon]

The {purrr} package is pretty beefy. It's better to use some light wrappers. See epipredict::compat-purrr or rlang::standalone-purrr.

[brookslogan]

Beefy in terms of install size, RAM, computational overhead? (I'm assuming rlang thing is for a different reason... they wanted purrr-style coding in a dependency of purrr [or, originally, maybe this was like v0 of purrr?].)

(Check on install size... in my R library it's 2MB vs. dplyr at 5MB, (broom at 5MB??,) rlang at ~6MB, readr at 9MB... [ + purrr comes packed with tidyverse so it's probably installed anyway])

[dajmcdon]

Install but also speed. I think one of @nmdefries changes in that PR is actually along these lines. Basically just copy that linked file from rlang, so you can use purrr-style functions when needed without the overhead.

[dshemetov]

Do we still want to do this? Is there more context for why we want to avoid purrr? I've never noticed it being a problem. @dajmcdon

[dajmcdon]

I try to avoid Imports/Dependencies where possible, especially for functions that are not user-facing. Even {dplyr} avoids the {purrr} import. I couldn't quickly find an explicit reason. But my guess is to avoid functional overhead for internal functions. Consider map_dbl(). The standalone is:

map_dbl <- function(.x, .f, ...) {
  .rlang_purrr_map_mold(.x, .f, double(1), ...)
}
.rlang_purrr_map_mold <- function(.x, .f, .mold, ...) {
  .f <- as_function(.f, env = global_env())
  out <- vapply(.x, .f, .mold, ..., USE.NAMES = FALSE)
  names(out) <- names(.x)
  out
}

while the {purrr} implementation needs a bunch of stuff. So "speed" is the likely reason.

https://github.com/r-lib/rlang/blob/main/R/standalone-purrr.R
https://github.com/tidyverse/dplyr/blob/main/R/import-standalone-purrr.R

[dshemetov]

Without metrics this seems like a premature optimization to me. But it's also a very reversable decision, so I'm fine with doing it if you feel confident about it.

[dshemetov]

Gonna close this for reasons described in the OP in cmu-delphi/epipredict#395. We can revisit later, but definitely low prio right now.