lintr
lintr makes the native pipe the default rule and clears out a decade of deprecations
Comparison · Infra & APIs
bench vs Dragonfly
A side-by-side editorial comparison of bench and Dragonfly — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
bench vs Dragonfly: at a glance
What is bench?
bench has settled into slow, careful upkeep of R's benchmarking workhorse.
bench provides high-precision timing and memory profiling for R expressions, and is the measurement tool much of the tidyverse reaches for. Releases arrive roughly yearly and are dominated by small API corrections, CRAN compliance work, and keeping pace with tidyverse minimum-R requirements.
What is Dragonfly?
Dragonfly is spending its releases on correctness debt, not features.
The last two months are almost entirely correctness work: a pub/sub ordering bug that silently discarded queued messages on unsubscribe, a multi-key PFCOUNT that read sixteen wrong registers, an uninitialized pointer in the sparse HyperLogLog promote path, and now cluster FLUSHSLOTS that was not journaled inside its own flush transaction. The one structural move is the resync of the forked hyperloglog.c against valkey upstream, which cut divergence from 2,139 lines to 767 and pulled in a CVE fix plus AVX2 and NEON merge kernels. New user-facing options are rare; the list compression tuning flags are the exception.
bench vs Dragonfly: editorial side-by-side
bench
0.0INFRA · APIS
bench has settled into slow, careful upkeep of R's benchmarking workhorse.
◆ Current state
bench provides high-precision timing and memory profiling for R expressions, and is the measurement tool much of the tidyverse reaches for. Releases arrive roughly yearly and are dominated by small API corrections, CRAN compliance work, and keeping pace with tidyverse minimum-R requirements.
◆ Where it's heading
The measurement surface has been effectively frozen since 1.1.0 added process-level memory tracking. Everything since trims rough edges — quieter progress output, consistent .grid handling, modern ggplot2 internals — rather than extending what the package can measure.
◆ Prediction
Expect continued maintenance releases driven by CRAN checks and ggplot2 or tidyverse deprecations, not new measurement capabilities.
Dragonfly
5.0INFRA · APIS
Dragonfly is spending its releases on correctness debt, not features.
◆ Current state
The last two months are almost entirely correctness work: a pub/sub ordering bug that silently discarded queued messages on unsubscribe, a multi-key PFCOUNT that read sixteen wrong registers, an uninitialized pointer in the sparse HyperLogLog promote path, and now cluster FLUSHSLOTS that was not journaled inside its own flush transaction. The one structural move is the resync of the forked hyperloglog.c against valkey upstream, which cut divergence from 2,139 lines to 767 and pulled in a CVE fix plus AVX2 and NEON merge kernels. New user-facing options are rare; the list compression tuning flags are the exception.
◆ Where it's heading
Two threads run in parallel. One reduces the cost of carrying a Redis fork by re-syncing individual files against valkey and leaving provenance notes so the next sync is cheap. The other hardens the V2 IO loop while the V1 path still takes the fixes — several commits explicitly defer the V2 half of a fix to a later change, so the two loops are not at parity. Cluster correctness around slot migration and journaling is the newest front.
◆ Prediction
The deferred V2 IO-loop fixes are the obvious next commits, and more forked Redis files are likely to get the same upstream resync treatment now that the pattern and its accounting are established.
Alternatives to bench and Dragonfly
Other Infra & APIs 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 bench or Dragonfly.
covr
covr's coverage tooling has been stable to the point of dormancy since 2022
cli
cli refines terminal output one formatting detail at a time.
roxygen2
roxygen2 8.0 cut stringi out of the entire devtools dependency tree.
pak
pak's roadmap is written by enterprise R deployments and Posit Package Manager.
renv
renv 1.2 made installs parallel, its biggest performance change in years.
See all bench alternatives → · See all Dragonfly alternatives →
Recent activity from bench and Dragonfly
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1d agoDragonflyBackported memory-accounting fix; FLUSHSLOTS journaled in-transaction
- 14d agoDragonflyi1.39.11: chore(hll): sync hyperloglog.c with valkey upstream (#7961)
- 20d agoDragonflyFix mutable cross-thread access on shared reply builder
- 22d agoDragonflyi1.39.9: fix(facade): preserve pub/sub order on unsubscribe (v1 IO loop) (#7909)
- 1mo agoDragonflyi1.39.6: test: skip V2-only pause tests under V1 (#7822)
- 1mo agoDragonflyi1.39.4: Add list compression tuning flags (#7762)
- 1y agobenchbench 1.1.4 quiets press() and raises the R floor to 4.0
- 3y agobenchbench 1.1.3 fixes tibble truncation and CRAN warnings
- 4y agobenchbench 1.1.2 relicenses to MIT under a new maintainer
- 6y agobenchbench 1.1.1 always includes memory columns in mark() output
- 6y agobenchbench 1.1.0 adds process-level memory tracking beyond the GC heap
- 6y agobenchbench 1.0.4 fixes examples on R without memory profiling
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between bench and Dragonfly?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Dragonfly is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 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.
Is bench better than Dragonfly?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Dragonfly is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 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 Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to bench?
Top bench alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "bench alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/bench-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Dragonfly?
Top Dragonfly alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Dragonfly alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/dragonfly for the full list with editorial commentary on each.