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Where are the industrial strength R compilers?

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2021-05-24 16:00:03

[This article was first published on The Shape of Code » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Why don’t compiler projects for the R language make it into production use? The few that have been written have remained individual experimental products, e.g., RLLVMCompile.

Most popular languages attract many compiler implementations. I’m not saying that any of these implementations have more than a handful of users, that they implement the full language (a full implementation is not common), or that they fulfil any need other than their implementers desire to build something.

A commonly heard reason for the lack of production R compilers is that it is not worth the time and effort, because most of an R program’s time is spent in the library code which is written in a compiled language (e.g., C or Fortran). The fact that it is probably not worth the time and effort has not stopped people writing compilers for other languages, but then I think that the kind of people who use R tend not to be the kind of people who want to spend their time writing compilers. On the whole, they are the kind of people who are into statistics and data analysis.