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Comparison · Infra & APIs
prospectr vs samplr
A side-by-side editorial comparison of prospectr and samplr — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
prospectr vs samplr: at a glance
What is prospectr?
prospectr spent its biggest release in years fixing spectra it had been quietly mangling.
prospectr provides the signal-processing layer for near-infrared and visible spectroscopy in R — Savitzky-Golay and gap-segment derivatives, standard normal variate, detrending, continuum removal, splice correction, plus calibration sampling algorithms like Kennard-Stone and DUPLEX and readers for ASD and BUCHI NIRCal instrument files. The May release is the substantial one: a long list of corrections to functions that were returning wrong or missing values rather than failing.
What is samplr?
A cognitive-science sampling package ships once, then goes quiet for eighteen months
samplr compares human performance against sampling algorithms, giving cognitive scientists the MCMC machinery to test whether people behave like samplers. Its entire public history is three releases: a 1.0.0 in August 2024, a floating-point fix eighteen seconds later, and then nothing until a February 2026 patch. The release notes are unusually thin even by CRAN standards.
prospectr vs samplr: editorial side-by-side
prospectr
0.0INFRA · APIS
prospectr spent its biggest release in years fixing spectra it had been quietly mangling.
◆ Current state
prospectr provides the signal-processing layer for near-infrared and visible spectroscopy in R — Savitzky-Golay and gap-segment derivatives, standard normal variate, detrending, continuum removal, splice correction, plus calibration sampling algorithms like Kennard-Stone and DUPLEX and readers for ASD and BUCHI NIRCal instrument files. The May release is the substantial one: a long list of corrections to functions that were returning wrong or missing values rather than failing.
◆ Where it's heading
The recent work is corrective rather than additive, and several items changed results silently before being caught. continuumRemoval() derived its convex-hull boundary offset from a fixed one-wavelength assumption that broke for fine-resolution spectra or non-nanometre units; cochranTest() passed an invalid argument name to prcomp() and produced incorrect principal component scores; readASD() silently dropped spectra in one branch of its text path. Two file readers were leaking connections. Alongside that runs a smaller thread of decoupling preprocessing steps from each other, most visibly detrend() gaining an snv argument so polynomial detrending can run without the SNV transform that Barnes et al. bundled with it.
◆ Prediction
The detrend() decoupling is the only recent addition and it fits a broader pipeline-composition direction, so similar separation of other bundled preprocessing steps is the plausible next move. The misspelled substraction argument now carries a deprecation warning, which schedules its removal for a future release.
samplr
0.0INFRA · APIS
A cognitive-science sampling package ships once, then goes quiet for eighteen months
◆ Current state
samplr compares human performance against sampling algorithms, giving cognitive scientists the MCMC machinery to test whether people behave like samplers. Its entire public history is three releases: a 1.0.0 in August 2024, a floating-point fix eighteen seconds later, and then nothing until a February 2026 patch. The release notes are unusually thin even by CRAN standards.
◆ Where it's heading
The feed shows a package that shipped and stopped. The 2024 tags were both created in one sitting and say almost nothing; the 2026 release is a row-count bug in Mean_Variance() bundled with citation metadata, a dropped dependency and http-to-https link fixes — the housekeeping profile of a package being kept alive for the paper that cites it rather than actively developed.
◆ Prediction
Adding citation information to the README is usually the move of a maintainer expecting the package to be referenced rather than extended. On this cadence the next release is more likely another CRAN-hygiene patch than new algorithms; there is not enough in these notes to say otherwise.
Alternatives to prospectr and samplr
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 prospectr or samplr.
massProps
A mass-properties rollup spends a year on documentation and follows its sibling's API
writeAlizer
Six months of releases and not one of them touched the scoring models
stochvol
A Bayesian volatility sampler in its maintenance decade, paying for its own speed
midr
A black-box interpreter reaches CRAN, then learns multi-class and survival responses
GeoThinneR
Spatial thinning grows a result object, and the API breaks to make room for it
See all prospectr alternatives → · See all samplr alternatives →
Recent activity from prospectr and samplr
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agoprospectrdetrend() can run without a prior SNV transformation
- 2mo agoprospectrContinuum removal, SNV and cochranTest corrected; readers stop leaking
- 5mo agosamplrMean_Variance() row count corrected after eighteen months
- 1y agoprospectrread_nircal() sample ID field fix
- 1y agosamplrFloating point comparison fix
- 1y agosamplrsamplr 1.0.0
- 3y agoprospectrNon-UTF8 sample IDs no longer become NA
- 4y agoprospectrkenStone() bug fix
- 4y agoprospectrread_nircal() execution failure fixed
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between prospectr and samplr?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. prospectr and samplr 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 prospectr better than samplr?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. prospectr and samplr 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 Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to prospectr?
Top prospectr alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "prospectr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/prospectr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to samplr?
Top samplr alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "samplr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/samplr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.