On Friday, January 2, 2015 2:59:04 PM UTC-5, Douglas Bates wrote: > > For many statistics-oriented Julia users there is a great advantage in > being able to piggy-back on R development and to use at least the data sets > from R packages. Hence the RDatasets package and the read_rda function in > the DataFrames package for reading saved R data. > > Over the last couple of days I have been experimenting with running an > embedded R within Julia and calling R functions from Julia. This is similar > in scope to the Rif package except that this code is written in Julia and > not as a set of wrapper functions written in C. The R API is a C API and, > in some ways, very simple. Everything in R is represented as a "symbolic > expression" or SEXPREC and passed around as pointers to such expressions > (called an SEXP type). Most functions take one or more SEXP values as > arguments and return an SEXP. > > I have avoided reading the code for Rif for two reasons: > 1. It is GPL3 licensed > 2. I already know a fair bit of the R API and where to find API function > signatures. >
AFAICT, Rif.jl is GPLv2+. I'm not sure how much a less restrictive license helps here. My understanding is that, because R is GPLv2+, code that links against it must be redistributed under GPLv2+ or a less restrictive license, i.e., while it would be legal to redistribute code that uses either Rif.jl or RCall.jl under GPLv2+ or MIT, neither could be used in closed source software. Simon
