terra is an R package that replaces raster.
It has a very similar interface, but it is simpler and much faster. The first (beta-) release was on 20 March 2020.
terra is written in C++. Classes, methods and properties are exposed via a Rcpp module. The R side has two main classes (SpatRaster and SpatVector) that represent spatial data. These classes are used to provide a standard R user-interface. There are tutorials at rspatial.org/terra.
terra is available from CRAN, so you can use install.packages("terra").
See below for instructions on installing the development version
First intstall the packages that terra depends on
install.packages("raster")
If you are on Windows, you need to first install Rtools to get a C++ compiler that R can use.
Then, in R, install the package.
remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")
The libraries GDAL (>= 3.0.0), GEOS (>= 3.3.0) and Proj.4 (>= 6.0.0) are required
Install Homebrew if you have not done so before, and then from the terminal:
brew install pkg-config
brew install gdal
And now, in R, install the package
remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")
If you get configure: error: libproj not found in standard or given locations. Then you need to install like this
remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra", configure-args="--with-proj-lib=/usr/local/lib/")
The libraries GDAL (>= 3.0.0), GEOS (>= 3.3.0) and Proj.4 (>= 6.0.0) are required
To install these on Ubuntu version 18.04 (Bionic) you can do:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev
And now, in R, install the package
remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")
See the sf instructions for installation on other linux systems --- and for possible updates/improvements on the above instructions. But note that terra depends on on more recent versions of GDAL and PROJ libraries