simlandr
Potential landscape tooling settling onto standard R generics after two rounds of renaming.
Comparison · Analytics
forrel vs rtrek
A side-by-side editorial comparison of forrel and rtrek — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
forrel vs rtrek: at a glance
What is forrel?
forrel is getting faster at the simulations forensic kinship work actually spends its time on.
forrel handles forensic pedigree analysis: kinship likelihood ratios, profile simulation, relationship checking, and missing person calculations. Version 1.9.0 synced with pedtools 2.11.0's loop handling, which the release notes credit with enabling complex pedigrees that were previously intractable, and moved profileSim() to mirai for parallelism. It also added fEstimate() for inbreeding coefficients and parentChildLikelihood() as a fast path for the simplest case.
What is rtrek?
A Star Trek data package that became a Memory Alpha web client and has been patching scrapers ever since.
rtrek bundles Star Trek datasets — book series, timelines, episode transcripts, species and homeworlds, map tile sets — and layers live retrieval on top through memory_alpha() and memory_beta() plus their ma_* and mb_* helpers. Recent releases are almost entirely repairs to that retrieval layer as the source wikis change their page structure.
forrel vs rtrek: editorial side-by-side
forrel
0.0ANALYTICS
forrel is getting faster at the simulations forensic kinship work actually spends its time on.
◆ Current state
forrel handles forensic pedigree analysis: kinship likelihood ratios, profile simulation, relationship checking, and missing person calculations. Version 1.9.0 synced with pedtools 2.11.0's loop handling, which the release notes credit with enabling complex pedigrees that were previously intractable, and moved profileSim() to mirai for parallelism. It also added fEstimate() for inbreeding coefficients and parentChildLikelihood() as a fast path for the simplest case.
◆ Where it's heading
Two long threads run through the window. One is making the common operations cheap: faster simulations through reorganized likelihood calculations, a dedicated parent-child path, dropped map attribute preservation, log-likelihoods to avoid underflow in kinshipLR(). The other is making relationship checking presentable, with checkPairwise() growing ggplot2 and plotly output, verbal relationship descriptions, and bootstrap p-values. Reference data is maintained alongside both, with the FORCE SNP panel completed and an X-chromosomal counterpart added.
◆ Prediction
With profileSim() on mirai and the loop handling synced, the next likely step is extending mirai parallelism to the other simulation-heavy functions such as exclusionPower() and the bootstrap in checkPairwise().
rtrek
0.0ANALYTICS
A Star Trek data package that became a Memory Alpha web client and has been patching scrapers ever since.
◆ Current state
rtrek bundles Star Trek datasets — book series, timelines, episode transcripts, species and homeworlds, map tile sets — and layers live retrieval on top through memory_alpha() and memory_beta() plus their ma_* and mb_* helpers. Recent releases are almost entirely repairs to that retrieval layer as the source wikis change their page structure.
◆ Where it's heading
The package's centre of gravity shifted once, at 0.2.0, from shipping static data to querying Memory Alpha and Memory Beta at runtime. Everything since has been the maintenance bill for that decision: HTML update fixes, parser improvements, portal retrieval bugs. Note that version numbers on this feed do not track time — 0.2.5 is stamped a year before 0.1.0, and three tags were backfilled within four minutes in November 2020 — so neither rank nor version ordering here indicates release sequence.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next release to fix retrieval against another Memory Alpha layout change, which is what the last four have done. The entries give no indication of new datasets or functions in progress.
Alternatives to forrel and rtrek
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 forrel or rtrek.
lavaanExtra
SEM reporting helpers converging on APA output, one CRAN resubmission at a time.
ibis.iSDM
A raster-to-terra migration is the only readable change in a feed of merge notes.
anyflights
A nycflights13 generator whose recent work is all about the data being right.
vinereg
Conditional density and log-likelihood fill out a vine copula regression package.
stringx
A drop-in string API for base R, kept alive by upstream check failures.
See all forrel alternatives → · See all rtrek alternatives →
Recent activity from forrel and rtrek
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agoforrelmirai parallelism and faster profile simulation
- 1y agoforrelFORCE SNP panel completed and X-chromosomal set added
- 1y agortrekMemory Alpha series portal retrieval fix
- 1y agoforrelrankProfiles() and access to special lumping
- 1y agoforrelacrossComps argument and readFam() unexported
- 1y agortrekrtrek 0.5.1 release
- 1y agoforrelcheckPairwise() overhauled with p-values and new plot backends
- 2y agortrekParser improvements for wiki retrieval
- 2y agoforrelFamilias interoperability split into pedFamilias
- 2y agortrekDead external content and data dependencies removed
- 5y agortrekFixes for source website HTML changes
- 5y agortrekMemory Alpha and Memory Beta web APIs added ⚡
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between forrel and rtrek?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. forrel and rtrek are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is forrel better than rtrek?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. forrel and rtrek are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to forrel?
Top forrel alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "forrel alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/forrel for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to rtrek?
Top rtrek alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "rtrek alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/rtrek for the full list with editorial commentary on each.