Linking R and Julia?

Question

Julia looks very promising for fast and syntax-sane computation (e.g. here), but I suspect it will not be anywhere near R in terms of overall statistics workflow for some ti

Answer 1

You also might want to check out my attempt: The JuliaConnectoR R-package. The package is available from GitHub and CRAN.

It's goal is to import functions from Julia directly in R such that they can be used like R functions in R code. The return values of Julia functions are translated to R data structures, which can be used in R and also be passed back to Julia. For a further integration of Julia and R, it is also possible to call back from Julia to R by passing R functions as callback functions.

Similar to XRJulia, the JuliaConnectoR relies on TCP, but it is functionally oriented and uses an optimized custom streaming format instead of text-based JSON messages as XRJulia does. One advantage of communicating by TCP is the stability with respect to different versions of Julia and R. This is much harder to maintain with an integration at the level of C interfaces like RCall and JuliaCall do.

The package works with Julia ≥ 1.0 and a wide range of R versions.