Performance improvement of countrycode

[yosuke-yasuda]

countrycode function should be faster to use it in colopreth map of Exploratory desktop

Now, we use https://github.com/vincentarelbundock/countrycode directly.

You can try

• stringr functions instead of default functions like gsub
• Rcpp or RcppParallel
  • http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Rcpp.html
  • https://rcppcore.github.io/RcppParallel/

Todo:

• Create examples for benchmark
• Check benchmark of current countrycode function
• Implement faster function
• Compare the benchmark

[cjyetman]

FYI... countrycode was recently updated and one of the improvements was a significant performance boost by factoring the incoming vector and only matching on the levels/unique values.