vroom

vroom is a delimited file reader for R that achieves speeds up to 1.23 GB/sec by indexing file locations rather than immediately reading all data. It uses R’s Altrep framework to lazily load data only when accessed, eliminating the performance cost of reading unused columns or rows.

The package supports nearly all readr parsing features while adding multi-file reading, multi-byte Unicode delimiters, and column selection. It uses multiple threads for indexing and parsing to further improve performance, delivering speeds 50x faster than base R and 10x faster than data.table on large datasets. vroom handles all standard delimited file complexities including quoted fields, custom delimiters, type guessing, and embedded newlines.