On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 17:43:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
R is done (thanks bachmeier)
Integration with R is largely complete, but the missing piece has always been lack of Windows support, which meant it wasn't an option for most users.
Just this morning I got things working on Windows. Now that all three major platforms have support, it is as reasonable to create an R package with D functions as C, C++ or Fortran. Anyone can write up a library of D functions and put a package on Bitbucket or Github. The R user doesn't even need to know which language the functions are written in.
This could possibly lead to wider adoption of D. Right now Rcpp is the most popular dependency for R packages (over 1000 at last check). And that's only a tiny fraction of overall Rcpp usage; many users write their own C++ code but don't upload a package to CRAN. It is my belief that these statisticians and econometricians and biologists - few of whom have a C++ background or know what a GC is - are open to a language like D. I plan to write a post on my website demonstrating usage soon.
On my agenda next are interoperability with Julia and Octave (which isn't that popular, but would make a lot of Matlab code available inside D). I honestly don't know if this will bring in new D users, but for the most part I don't care, because I'm doing it for my own research. Nonetheless, I think the potential to expand the D userbase is there.
