webchem
Adding chemical databases with one hand while public ones close programmatic access with the other.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of admiralonco and mirai — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
The oncology ADaM helper is dissolving into admiral core, one deprecation at a time.
admiralonco is the oncology companion to admiral, and it ships response-criteria recipes rather than code: RECIST, iRECIST, IMWG, GCIG and PCWG3 each arrive as a vignette plus an ADaM template. Cadence is one or two releases a year, each adding a criteria vignette. The 1.4.0 release began deprecating most of the package's own exported functions in favour of generic admiral equivalents.
mirai removed its dispatcher process and added memory backpressure to the queue.
The async evaluation framework releases roughly monthly and moves fast at the architecture level. In 2.7.0 the dispatcher stopped being a separate process and became a thread, after its loop had already been rewritten in C inside nanonext one release earlier. The same release added an opt-in memory budget for queued task payloads and try_mirai(), which returns NULL immediately rather than blocking when that budget is exhausted.
admiralonco is the oncology companion to admiral, and it ships response-criteria recipes rather than code: RECIST, iRECIST, IMWG, GCIG and PCWG3 each arrive as a vignette plus an ADaM template. Cadence is one or two releases a year, each adding a criteria vignette. The 1.4.0 release began deprecating most of the package's own exported functions in favour of generic admiral equivalents.
The package is converging on a documentation-and-templates model: reusable derivation logic moves upstream into admiral, and admiralonco keeps only the oncology-specific know-how. Every release since 1.0.0 has added a criteria vignette rather than new exported functions, and 1.4.1 extends that by making the template set browsable from the Get Started menu. The surface users program against is shrinking while the guidance they read is growing.
Expect the deprecation cycle started in 1.4.0 to advance through its warning and error phases across the next one or two releases, with new work arriving as another response-criteria vignette rather than new functions.
The async evaluation framework releases roughly monthly and moves fast at the architecture level. In 2.7.0 the dispatcher stopped being a separate process and became a thread, after its loop had already been rewritten in C inside nanonext one release earlier. The same release added an opt-in memory budget for queued task payloads and try_mirai(), which returns NULL immediately rather than blocking when that budget is exhausted.
Two threads of work run together: cutting overhead out of the task path — thread-based dispatcher, in-process transport for synchronous daemons, lower per-element dispatch cost in mirai_map() — and making the framework safe to embed in an event loop, where blocking the host R thread is not acceptable. Deployment reach is growing too, with http_config() launching remote daemons over HTTP APIs and auto-configuring for Posit Workbench. Each release pins a minimum nanonext version, so the two packages advance as one unit.
With backpressure in place but opt-in, the open question these notes leave is whether a default memory budget arrives; continued overhead reduction and Shiny-facing non-blocking paths are the safer bet.
Other Analytics products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either admiralonco or mirai.
Adding chemical databases with one hand while public ones close programmatic access with the other.
The spatiotemporal companion to sf, moving at the pace of the packages around it.
An interface to Europe's long-term ecosystem research network that went quiet after 2.0.
Spatial model assessment that spent the last year on cross-platform arithmetic and CRAN rules.
Stopped trusting the cloud to prepare its taxonomic databases and does the conversion locally.
Went from estimating felling dates to doing the crossdating that produces them.
See all admiralonco alternatives → · See all mirai alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. mirai is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. mirai is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
Top admiralonco alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "admiralonco alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/admiralonco for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top mirai alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "mirai alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mirai for the full list with editorial commentary on each.