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Comparison · Analytics
filearray vs ggcorrplot
A side-by-side editorial comparison of filearray and ggcorrplot — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
filearray vs ggcorrplot: at a glance
What is filearray?
The on-disk array layer under RAVE spends its releases hunting segfaults.
filearray stores large arrays on disk and reads them back with little memory overhead, serving as the storage substrate for the RAVE intracranial EEG stack. The 0.2.2 release fixes out-of-bound indexing that caused segfaults along certain margins and an ASAN-flagged signed integer overflow in the load path. The user-facing API has been stable since 0.1.6.
What is ggcorrplot?
ggcorrplot came back after four years and found its significance markers had been lying
ggcorrplot draws correlation matrices in ggplot2 with optional significance marking and hierarchical reordering. It sat untouched from late 2022 until mid-2026, then shipped 0.2.0 and 0.3.0 sixteen days apart. Between them they added the display options users had been requesting since 2016 and repaired a set of bugs where hc.order = TRUE silently changed which cells were marked significant.
filearray vs ggcorrplot: editorial side-by-side
filearray
0.0ANALYTICS
The on-disk array layer under RAVE spends its releases hunting segfaults.
◆ Current state
filearray stores large arrays on disk and reads them back with little memory overhead, serving as the storage substrate for the RAVE intracranial EEG stack. The 0.2.2 release fixes out-of-bound indexing that caused segfaults along certain margins and an ASAN-flagged signed integer overflow in the load path. The user-facing API has been stable since 0.1.6.
◆ Where it's heading
This is infrastructure whose release history reads as a memory-safety log: unprotected C++ variables, buffer sizes exceeding array length, allocations one byte short, endianness on big-endian platforms, and now out-of-bound margins caught by sanitizers. The one sustained feature direction is reducing the cost of operating on arrays too large for memory — lazy operator evaluation through a proxy class, fmap-style application, and marginal collapse. Portability work has steadily removed hard requirements, dropping the C++11 declaration and swapping OpenMP for TinyThreads to get parallelism on macOS.
◆ Prediction
Expect continued sanitizer-driven patches rather than new interfaces; the three-year gap before 0.2.2 suggests releases now arrive only when a crash or a CRAN check demands one.
ggcorrplot
2.5ANALYTICS
ggcorrplot came back after four years and found its significance markers had been lying
◆ Current state
ggcorrplot draws correlation matrices in ggplot2 with optional significance marking and hierarchical reordering. It sat untouched from late 2022 until mid-2026, then shipped 0.2.0 and 0.3.0 sixteen days apart. Between them they added the display options users had been requesting since 2016 and repaired a set of bugs where hc.order = TRUE silently changed which cells were marked significant.
◆ Where it's heading
Both releases chase the same target: parity with the older corrplot package inside a ggplot2 object. Significance stars appended to coefficient labels, circle scaling, decimal control, then boxed cells and glyphs sized by absolute correlation — these are corrplot's visual vocabulary reimplemented where they can be composed with other ggplot2 layers. The bug fixes point the other way, at foundations: p-values matched to cells by name rather than row position, clustering computed on the unrounded matrix, tl.col actually applied.
◆ Prediction
With the corrplot look largely reproduced and the correctness backlog cleared, the remaining gap is the mixed upper/lower display corrplot supports; that is the natural next argument if the current release pace holds.
Alternatives to filearray and ggcorrplot
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 filearray or ggcorrplot.
fastplyr
A fast dplyr stand-in that keeps finding new places to skip work entirely.
trias
Belgium's invasive-species indicator toolkit is in steady refinement, one plotting edge case at a time.
icesSAG
The ICES stock assessment client took upload away in 2024 and spent two years giving it back.
dggridR
A discrete global grid generator grew cell traversal and became a usable spatial index.
vegan
Community ecology's standard toolkit is retiring the functions a generation of scripts was built on.
See all filearray alternatives → · See all ggcorrplot alternatives →
Recent activity from filearray and ggcorrplot
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 21d agoggcorrplotggcorrplot 0.3.0 adds boxed cells and correlation-sized squares
- 1mo agoggcorrplotggcorrplot 0.2.0 fixes significance markers broken by hc.order
- 2mo agofilearraySegfault on out-of-bound margins fixed
- 3y agofilearrayLazy operator evaluation and macOS parallelism
- 3y agoggcorrplotggcorrplot 0.1.4
- 3y agofilearraySequential read bug in fmap corrected
- 4y agofilearrayPartition limit removed by opening files on demand
- 4y agofilearrayHeader signatures and symbolic link detection
- 4y agofilearrayFlush timing left to the operating system
- 6y agoggcorrplotggcorrplot 0.1.3
- 7y agoggcorrplotggcorrplot 0.1.2
- 10y agoggcorrplotggcorrplot's first release: correlograms in ggplot2
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between filearray and ggcorrplot?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. ggcorrplot 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.
Is filearray better than ggcorrplot?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. ggcorrplot 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.
What are the best alternatives to filearray?
Top filearray alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "filearray alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/filearray-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to ggcorrplot?
Top ggcorrplot alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggcorrplot alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggcorrplot for the full list with editorial commentary on each.