The targets R Package Design Specification

1 Introduction

The targets package is a Make-like pipeline toolkit for Statistics and data science in R. With targets, you can maintain a reproducible workflow without repeating yourself. targets learns how your pipeline fits together, skips costly runtime for tasks that are already up to date, runs only the necessary computation, supports implicit parallel computing, abstracts files as R objects, and shows tangible evidence that the results match the underlying code and data.

1.1 Design

targets has an elaborate structure to support its advanced features while ensuring decent performance. This bookdown site is a design specification to explain the major aspects of the internal architecture, including the data storage model, object oriented design, and orchestration and branching model.