Fast aggregation of large data (e.g. 100GB in RAM), fast ordered joins, fast add/modify/delete of columns by group using no copies at all, list columns, friendly and fast character-separated-value read/write. Offers a natural and flexible syntax, for faster development.

Matt Dowle [aut, cre],
  Arun Srinivasan [aut],
  Jan Gorecki [ctb],
  Michael Chirico [ctb],
  Pasha Stetsenko [ctb],
  Tom Short [ctb],
  Steve Lianoglou [ctb],
  Eduard Antonyan [ctb],
  Markus Bonsch [ctb],
  Hugh Parsonage [ctb]

S4 implementation of vector-like and list-like objects

The S4Vectors package defines the Vector and List virtual classes
	and a set of generic functions that extend the semantic of ordinary
	vectors and lists in R. Package developers can easily implement
	vector-like or list-like objects as concrete subclasses of Vector or
	List. In addition, a few low-level concrete subclasses of general
	interest (e.g. DataFrame, Rle, and Hits) are implemented in the
	S4Vectors package itself (many more are implemented in the IRanges
	package and in other Bioconductor infrastructure packages).

R (>= 3.3.0), methods, utils, stats, stats4, BiocGenerics (>=
0.23.3)

IRanges, GenomicRanges, SummarizedExperiment, Matrix,
DelayedArray, ShortRead, graph, data.table, RUnit, BiocStyle

S4-utils.R show-utils.R utils.R normarg-utils.R LLint-class.R
isSorted.R subsetting-utils.R vector-utils.R integer-utils.R
character-utils.R eval-utils.R map_ranges_to_runs.R
DataTable-class.R Annotated-class.R Vector-class.R
Vector-comparison.R Vector-setops.R Vector-merge.R Hits-class.R
Hits-comparison.R Hits-setops.R Rle-class.R Rle-utils.R
List-class.R List-comparison.R List-utils.R SimpleList-class.R
HitsList-class.R DataFrame-class.R Pairs-class.R
expand-methods.R FilterRules-class.R aggregate-methods.R
shiftApply-methods.R split-methods.R zzz.R

c(person("Terry", "Therneau", role = "aut",
	            email = "therneau@mayo.edu"),
             person("Beth", "Atkinson", role = c("aut", "cre"),
	            email = "atkinson@mayo.edu"),
             person("Brian", "Ripley", role = "trl",
                    email = "ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk",
		    comment = "producer of the initial R port, maintainer 1999-2017"))