On Thursday, 8 December 2016 at 02:10:35 UTC, Jon Degenhardt
wrote:
A cycle I think is common is for a researcher (industry or
academic) to write functionality in native R code, then when
trying to scale it, finds native R code is too slow, and
switches to C/C++ to create a library used in R. C/C++ is
chosen not because it the preferred choice, but because it is
the common choice.
In such situations, the performance need is often to be quite a
bit faster than native R code, not that it reach zero overhead.
My personal opinion, but I do think D would be a very good
choice here, run-time, phobos, gc, etc., included. The larger
barrier to entry is more about ease of getting started,
community (are others using this approach), etc., and less
about having the absolutely most optimal performance. (There
are obviously areas where the most optimal performance is
critical, Mir seems to be targeting a number of them.)
Rcpp is the most common dependency for R packages on CRAN. (I
actually contributed an example that Dirk went on to use quite
often, including his book.[1]) That motivated me to do something
similar for D.[2] I have created other packages, though they have
less documentation.[3]
It will be important to keep the technical requirements low if
others are going to adopt D. I use the R package manager for
everything, because Dub would require them to learn something
that they'd view as weird. And having to understand memory
management, as with Rust, would definitely not work. To this
point I have focused on adding functionality and ease of
installation so as to get my coauthors to use it. Mir is a
wonderful project, but those advanced developers are not the ones
that would embed D inside an R program, and they would definitely
not feel comfortable with the things a
statistician/econometrician expects.
[1] http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2011/04/23/
[2] https://bitbucket.org/bachmeil/embedr
[3] For example, https://bitbucket.org/bachmeil/dmdgretl,
https://bitbucket.org/bachmeil/dmdquadprog,
https://bitbucket.org/bachmeil/dmdoptim
