RTMB pros #52
Description
The README.md lists some key advantages of RTMB compared to TMB.
A couple of advantages that are particularly relevant for current development and analyses here at SPC are:
- Easy to provide many different model functions in one package.
- Easy to link together functions from many packages and scripts.
Rather than adding these bullet points via a pull request, I wanted to run them by the RTMB steering committee (Kasper) and the user community. Do you agree that these are important advantages and can you think of ways to improve the wording?
The first point was relevant for the fishgrowth package released on CRAN earlier this year, which we are using to estimate tuna growth curves. For package development and maintenance, it is both convenient and nonrestrictive that the various growth models can be implemented independent of each other and provided as simple functions, rather than implementing the different models within one single function as a TMB workaround.
The second point is relevant for the SPC strategy of collaborative development of next-generation tuna assessment models. Based on our experimental development and tests, RTMB seems to offer an even better platform than TMB for modular linking in a FIMS-like fashion.