How I became a crolute i.e. an user of the crul package

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago rOpenSci’s Scott Chamberlain asked me for feedback about a new package of his called crul, an http client like httr, so basically something you use for e.g. writing a package interfacing an API. He told me that a great thing about crul was that it supports asynchronous requests. I felt utterly uncool because I had no idea what this meant although I had already written quite a few API packages (for instance ropenaq, riem and opencage).

So I googled the concept, my mind was blown and I decided that I’d trust Scott’s skills (spoiler: you can always do that) and just replace the httr dependency of ropenaq by crul. Why? First of all note that Crul is a planet in Star Wars whose male inhabitants are called crolutes which sound quite cool (there are female ones as well, called gilliands which doesn’t sound like the package name) and which I now use as a synonym for “user of the crul package”. But I had other reasons to switch… that was the subject of my lightning talk today at the French R conference in Anglet. In this blog post I’ll tell the story again, with a bit more details, in the hope to make you curious about crul!

Pic by ThinkR, thanks Colin/Diane/Vincent!

OpenAQ on Maëlle Salmon's personal website

How I became a crolute i.e. an user of the crul package