Friday June 26, 2026
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM & 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Karl Miller Center, 615 SW Harrison Street, Portland, OR
Room KMC TBD
Rust is taking the world by storm due to its speed, safety, and efficiency. The extendr library provides a developer-friendly Rust alternative to Rcpp and cpp11, enabling you to build fast and scalable R packages. This workshop is tailored for R developers with no prior experience in Rust or compiled languages. Starting from the fundamentals, we'll cover essential Rust concepts by drawing parallels with R (morning workshop), then progress to building a complete Rust-based R package (afternoon workshop). You'll learn to write vectorized functions with robust error handling and create performant packages from the ground up using Rust and {rextendr}.
Knowledge Prerequisites: Intermediate expertise in R. This means familiarity with R's fundamental types: lists, atomic vectors, for loops / iteration, and writing
We strongly recommend participants take both parts of this workshop.
Instructor
Josiah Parry
Pronouns: He/him/his
Location: Seattle, Washington
Josiah Parry believes R belongs in production. He has a penchant for writing R packages that are really fast and efficient. Typically, this involves writing Rust and glueing R them together using extendr. He also, quite specifically, likes solving geospatial problems. He works at Esri doing spatial statistics and —you guessed it— writing R packages.
Learn more at josiahparry.com.