rjd3highfreq
rjd3highfreq ships whatever the Java side ships, and only occasionally says what that was.
Comparison · Analytics
deeptime vs vellum
A side-by-side editorial comparison of deeptime and vellum — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
deeptime vs vellum: at a glance
What is deeptime?
A geologic-time plotting layer that outgrew time axes and became a geology rendering toolkit.
deeptime extends ggplot2 with geological time scales, radial deep-time coordinates and phylogeny-aware geoms, and since 2.0.0 it also renders standardized FGDC/USGS geologic patterns as ggplot2 fills. The current 2.4.0 release adds geom_text_clade() for labeling clades on radial phylogenies and repairs long-standing coord_trans_xy() and scale-placement edge cases.
What is vellum?
vellum's bugs are now found by using it, not testing it — the downstream grammar is doing the QA.
The rendering engine shipped nine releases in the two weeks around the end of July, six of them on a single day. Almost every entry is a correctness fix in a capability that worked when drawn and failed when measured, or worked in isolation and failed in composition. The release notes are unusually forensic: each one states the mechanism, the observable symptom, and why the fix mirrors the draw path rather than reimplementing it.
deeptime vs vellum: editorial side-by-side
deeptime
0.0ANALYTICS
A geologic-time plotting layer that outgrew time axes and became a geology rendering toolkit.
◆ Current state
deeptime extends ggplot2 with geological time scales, radial deep-time coordinates and phylogeny-aware geoms, and since 2.0.0 it also renders standardized FGDC/USGS geologic patterns as ggplot2 fills. The current 2.4.0 release adds geom_text_clade() for labeling clades on radial phylogenies and repairs long-standing coord_trans_xy() and scale-placement edge cases.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is converging on two jobs: being the canonical R renderer for stratigraphic drawing conventions, and keeping pace with ggplot2's own churn. A sustained deprecation program — gggeo_scale(), coord_geo_polar(), getScaleData(), now disparity_through_time() — is trimming the surface down to coord_geo(), coord_geo_radial() and the pattern functions. Roughly half of each recent release is ggplot2 4.0 compatibility work.
◆ Prediction
Expect disparity_through_time() and coord_geo_polar() to be removed outright in the next major version, and further geoms aimed at annotating radial phylogenies.
vellum
5.0ANALYTICS
vellum's bugs are now found by using it, not testing it — the downstream grammar is doing the QA.
◆ Current state
The rendering engine shipped nine releases in the two weeks around the end of July, six of them on a single day. Almost every entry is a correctness fix in a capability that worked when drawn and failed when measured, or worked in isolation and failed in composition. The release notes are unusually forensic: each one states the mechanism, the observable symptom, and why the fix mirrors the draw path rather than reimplementing it.
◆ Where it's heading
The pivotal detail is stated outright in 0.6.3 — the first bug in the series found by using the engine from vellumplot rather than testing it in isolation. Every release since names the downstream as the source: the contrast rule's false positives, the lint rules that fired on all five sample plots, the keyed roundrect batch. A rendering engine with a real grammar built on top of it is now getting the integration coverage that unit tests structurally cannot provide, and the fixes are converging on one theme: the measurement path and the draw path must not drift.
◆ Prediction
Expect the release rate to fall as the vellumplot integration surface is exhausted, with remaining work concentrated in the lint rule set now that it is meant to gate builds rather than just inform.
Alternatives to deeptime and vellum
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 deeptime or vellum.
audubon
audubon's release feed is almost entirely Renovate bumping the JavaScript toolchain behind its Japanese text splitter.
affiner
affiner is quietly turning a grid transformation helper into a small computational geometry library.
ageproR
ageproR spent two years chasing a moving file format, then added the recruitment models that justify the effort.
r-ledger
ledger adds a Rust toolchain fallback, so beancount imports work whether or not the Python tooling is installed.
gridpattern
gridpattern keeps widening its catalogue, and the newest patterns finally use the device's own line rendering.
See all deeptime alternatives → · See all vellum alternatives →
Recent activity from deeptime and vellum
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 11d agovellumLinter grows to 20 rules and stops firing on every plot
- 13d agovellumAnimated SVGs no longer blink once and vanish or play in reverse
- 13d agovellumPick table now reports device pixels instead of two coordinate systems
- 14d agovellumContrast rule stops flagging every plot; gridlines become PDF artifacts
- 14d agovellumgrobwidth and grobheight now measure wrapped text, not the unwrapped line
- 14d agovellumKeyed roundrect becomes a real batch after downstream integration exposes it
- 1mo agodeeptimegeom_text_clade() labels clades on radial phylogenies
- 8mo agodeeptimeArgument renames for ggplot2 4.0 parity
- 8mo agodeeptimePattern code dictionary and time-scale theming
- 1y agodeeptimegeom_text_phylo() arrives with ggplot2 4 compatibility
- 1y agodeeptimeContrast-aware label colors across the built-in scales
- 1y agodeeptimeFGDC geologic patterns become ggplot2 fills ⚡
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between deeptime and vellum?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. vellum 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 deeptime better than vellum?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. vellum 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 Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to deeptime?
Top deeptime alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "deeptime alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/deeptime-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to vellum?
Top vellum alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "vellum alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/vellum-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.