Hi Verena, Polyglot code can be tricky as Hervé points out. Another option, if you're open to using Rcpp in your Bioconductor package, is the mlpack C++ header-only library that interfaces with Julia, R, Python, and Go (mlpack.org) and there is a spack package that may simplify the installation for you (packages.spack.io/package.html?name=mlpack) if you're not keen on containers and/or prefer native architecture compilation.
That way, you're specifying an external dependency on mlpack only for which you can also create an R package (CRAN has plenty of C++ header-only packages you can refer to) and to Hervé's point you could limit certain unit tests that are julia-specific to CI systems that provide that functionality (perhaps your own). I don't use mlpack and don't know how well it would suit your purpose; you don't describe what Julia packages or functionality you're using the Julia code for. mlpack is the only relevant result that showed up from searching for polyglot r packages in the spack repository with julia [1]. As Hervé mentions, you would have to think carefully about your user setup experience and how maintainable it would be to have robust packaging with Julia code compared to rewriting the Julia code into existing R packages or setup that requires fewer additional steps and moving parts. I don't meant to discourage you from what you're doing: polyglot code is more common and in large scientific codes but can need a bit of work to maintain within language-specific package managers or require a language-agnostic package manager. Pariksheet [1] Namely: git clone https://github.com/spack/spack.git spack cd spack source share/spack/setup-env.sh spack repo update spack cd -P grep -lw r packages/*/*.py | xargs grep -F julia less packages/mlpack/package.py ________________________________________ From: Bioc-devel <[email protected]> on behalf of Hervé Pagès <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, January 30, 2026 1:26 PM To: Verena Korber; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Bioc-devel] Bioconductor package based on Julia? Hi Verena, I personally don't have any experience with using Julia within an R package, and I don't think we have any packages in Bioconductor that do this at the moment. As you mentioned, the implication is that users will need a Julia installation for the package to run. Ask yourself how many users are going to be comfortable doing this. I don't know how mainstream Julia has become at this point, and how easy it is to install. Is it available on the 4 major platforms that we officially support, i.e. on Linux, Windows, Intel Mac, and Mac Silicon? It also means that we will need to install Julia on our build machines. And also that, in the near future, the builds on r-universe will be able to accommodate this requirement (I'm mentioning this in the context of an ongoing effort by the core team to move the Bioconductor daily builds to the r-universe build facilities). At the very least, you'll need to: 1. List Julia in the SystemRequirements field of the package. 2. Provide an INSTALL file that explains how to install Julia on the 4 major platforms that we support. See https://contributions.bioconductor.org/sysdep.html?q=install#sysdep They have JuliaCall and JuliaConnectoR on CRAN for interfacing R with Julia code, which I'm not familiar with either, but it seems to me that you'd want to leverage that. Sorry for the very generic answer. Hopefully someone on this mailing list has some experience with Julia in R and can give more useful recommendations. Best, H. On 15/01/2026 08:47, Verena Korber via Bioc-devel wrote: > Hello, > > We are currently developing an R package that sources Julia code. Is it > possible to submit sth. like this to Bioconductor and if so, what would the > requirements be? I guess one challenge is that users would need a Julia > installation for the package to run. If anyone has any experience in that > direction, it would be super helpful. > > Many thanks and kind regards, > > Verena > _______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel -- Hervé Pagès Bioconductor Core Team [email protected] [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
