Recently I have released a new package on CRAN: lt, short for lightweight tables (or less than). Its origin story is a small moment of shock. About two years ago a project required gt, so I ran install.packages(‘gt’) in a fresh R session on Linux — and then watched R install one package after another after another, as if it were going to install half of CRAN. Some of them had to be compiled, and a few took ages; V8 in particular …