Also, no plans to put it on CRAN, despite basically everyone asking us to.
Pro: We can release whenever we want. CRAN is very restrictive because of (a) package size, (b) lack of dependency management, and (c) ability of third-party packages to write arbitrary unit tests against your output.
Con: Some people work for organizations that only let their employees run CRAN packages. They’re out of luck. Having said that, I don’t know what company would allow someone to use a CRAN package where the first step in using it is downloading a third-party application either as a binary or building it from scratch.
BridgeStan is using lower-level foreign function interfaces than either RStan or PyStan. This makes it much easier to install and much more compatible with changing R versions and platforms. It also makes it very easy to share memory.