Back in June I discovered pqR, Radford Neal’s fork of R designed to improve performance. Then in July, I heard about Tibco’s TERR, a C++ rewrite of the R engine suitable for the enterprise. At this point it dawned on me that R might end up like SQL, with many different implementations of a common language suitable for different purposes.
As it turned out, the future is nearer than I thought. As well as pqR and TERR, there are four other projects: Renjin, a Java-based rewrite that makes it easy to integrate with Java software and has some performance benefits; fastR, another Java-based engine focused on performance; Riposte, a C++ rewrite that also focuses on performance; and CXXR, a set of C++ modifications to GNU R that focus on maintainability and extensibility.
I think that having a choice of R engine is a good thing. The development model of…
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