16.1 Introduction

You now know about the three most important OOP toolkits available in R. Now that you understand their basic operation and the principles that underlie them, we can start to compare and contrast the systems in order to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This will help you pick the system that is most likely to solve new problems.

Overall, when picking an OO system, I recommend that you default to S3. S3 is simple, and widely used throughout base R and CRAN. While it’s far from perfect, its idiosyncrasies are well understood and there are known approaches to overcome most shortcomings. If you have an existing background in programming you are likely to lean towards R6, because it will feel familiar. I think you should resist this tendency for two reasons. Firstly, if you use R6 it’s very easy to create a non-idiomatic API that will feel very odd to native R users, and will have surprising pain points because of the reference semantics. Secondly, if you stick to R6, you’ll lose out on learning a new way of thinking about OOP that gives you a new set of tools for solving problems.

Outline

• Section 16.2 compares S3 and S4. In brief, S4 is more formal and tends to require more upfront planning. That makes it more suitable for big projects developed by teams, not individuals.

• Section 16.3 compares S3 and R6. This section is quite long because these two systems are fundamentally different and there are a number of tradeoffs that you need to consider.

Prerequisites

You need to be familiar with S3, S4, and R6, as discussed in the previous three chapters.