Reference manual

User Manual

Reference pages generated from the repo docs and ordered for subsystem lookup.

Read the divergences Inspect package loading
  • Generated from the repo `docs/` directory so the site stays close to the implementation notes.
  • Ordered for lookup and subsystem reading instead of dumping pages in an undifferentiated list.
  • Complements the guide pages with longer-form explanations of runtime behavior and sharp edges.
manual scope

The manual is for exact runtime behavior, not just orientation.

6 reference pages generated from repo docs
Runtime package loading, native calls, graphics state, and tracebacks
Design intentional divergences from GNU R and the reasoning behind them

How to use the manual

Use the manual when you need the deeper reference view of miniR's runtime behavior instead of a high-level guide.

  • Start with Divergences from GNU R when you need to know whether a behavior change is intentional.
  • Read Package Runtime and Native Runtime when package loading or extension behavior is the real subject.
  • Use Graphics Devices and Tracebacks and Backtraces when debugging output and diagnostics.
  • Treat focused pages such as the HDF5 note as implementation references rather than product-level overviews.

Full Index

Every manual page, ordered as a reference path.

Start near the top if you are learning the runtime. Jump deeper when you already know which subsystem you need.

Manual page 1

Divergences from GNU R

miniR intentionally diverges from GNU R where R's behavior is confusing, inconsistent, or unnecessarily restrictive. This is not a drop-in replacement — it's a fresh implementation that respects R's useful semantics while fixing the bad ones.
Manual page 2

Package Runtime

miniR treats package loading as a runtime subsystem with its own environment model, metadata parsing, native loading path, and help indexing. This page is the reference view of that pipeline.
Manual page 3

Native Runtime

miniR's native story is not only about compiling package src/ trees. It also includes a Rust implementation of a large slice of the R C API, callback plumbing back into the interpreter, and an error boundary that can survive longjmp-style native failures.
Manual page 4

Graphics Devices

miniR's graphics stack is intentionally layered around interpreter-owned state, a shared plot model, and device backends that build on each other instead of reimplementing rendering from scratch for every output format.
Manual page 5

Tracebacks And Backtraces

miniR has two related debugging layers: R-level tracebacks and native backtraces. Both are stored per interpreter so failures in one session do not overwrite debugging state in another session.
Manual page 6

HDF5 → dgCMatrix: Single-Copy Path

Read CSC sparse matrices from HDF5 files into R's dgCMatrix (from the Matrix package) as fast as possible — single copy, no intermediate buffers.