Provide an interface for R language

[XianglinZhang-risker]

Hello, have you considered providing an interface for R language? R language has packages to call Rust. I don’t know the difficulty level. If you want, I hope we can work together or find someone who is very good at R language to complete this task. This must be a great job, and I have observed that it is faster than data.table. Thanks.

[jonekeat]

@andy-thomason & @jeroen might able to leave some suggestions

[XianglinZhang-risker]

@andy-thomason & @jeroen might able to leave some suggestions

[XianglinZhang-risker]

Sorry, I clicked close by mistake.

Of course, they are all outstanding contributors to the R language, and extendr provides a good way to call Rust for R. It would be great if they were willing to join.

[andy-thomason]

This looks like an interesting project. I made a fairly large contribution to Arrow a couple of years ago as we were using it for bioinformatics data at work.

It should be fairly easy to generate bindings using extendr and you would be welcome to raise an issue and get some help from the team.

I'll try to look over your project in the next few days.

[ChristopherEeles]

Has any progress on this topic been made? I am a full-time R developer with an interest in high-performance data frame libraries as well as an inkling to learn Rust.

If someone has already started an R project, I would love to contribute.

[XianglinZhang-risker]

Because of my lack of programming skills and busy work, I did not start this project.

[andy-thomason]

We (the extendr team) would be happy to help to interface anything to R.

https://github.com/extendr/extendr

[ritchie46]

We (the extendr team) would be happy to help to interface anything to R.

https://github.com/extendr/extendr

Great to hear there is so much interest in this. I'd welcome such an undertaking and would be very glad to help with technical guidance. But I don't know any R, and don't have the time to help maintain another API, so this would become a community effort.

[ChristopherEeles]

I would be happy to contribute to development of the R API. But I am in the opposite position of knowing very little Rust. That being said, the documentation for the Polars Rust library is very good.

In terms of maintenance, I will need too speak to my boss. I work in an academic lab developing R packages/pipelines for computational biology research. If I can get our lab on board, we could likely handle most of the maintenance of the R code. Or at least coordinate efforts on the R side of development.

Maybe we can recruit contributors via GitHub Discussions on this repo?

Pending management signing off I could likely start development work in Q1 2021.

[andy-thomason]

That would be great. It would be good to have some largeish projects being ported.

I suggest you raise an issue in https://github.com/extendr/extendr/issues

We have a number of expert R users who can help out with the look and feel.

[jonekeat]

cc @dbdahl also for his cargo framework

[ritchie46]

For the Rust side of things, I believe all should be in place, and if something is missing. I can pick that up.

The existent python bindings could act as standard implementation and should help the migration a lot, I believe.

[dbdahl]

Polars looks like a really great project. Those are impressive benchmarks. Having an R interface for it works be great.

Thanks @jonekeat for mentioning my cargo framework for R packages based on Rust. I would be glad to engage with anyone who wants to develop an package using it, but I don't have the bandwidth to contribute substantially to the heavy lifting.