Contributing to base R: notes from R Dev Day

What happens at an R Dev Day, the base R connection bug I worked on, and pair programming with VS Code Live Share.

Talk · Group meeting, MRC Biostatistics Unit

Slides (PDF) R Dev Day issue #27

A session at our group meeting about my day at the R Dev Day held alongside RSECon25. R Dev Days are short events, usually one day, where new and experienced contributors work together on contributions to base R, with support from the R Core Team.

The session covered:

• how the day is organised: a shared list of open issues on documentation, translation, I/O and low-level code, each with a facilitator and contributors;
• the issue I worked on, #27, reported by Henrik Bengtsson. In R a connection is identified by a small integer that gets reused, so after close(con1) a new connection can take the same number and con1 silently points to it. Writing to con1 then writes to the wrong file. Every connection also has a unique internal id, visible through the conn_id attribute, and that is what can tell the two apart;
• VS Code Live Share, which lets several people edit and debug the same code at once from their own machines.