feature: Support for R

[abfleishman]

Is there any chance that you will add support for the R programming language? I am a ecologist and fluent in R (common in my field) and would love to have windmill run my R scripts with UI inputs.

[rubenfiszel]

We are working on this and are expecting to have it in the next few weeks @HugoCasa

[abfleishman]

Will it be available at the free tier of just the enterprise tier?

[rubenfiszel]

likely free tier, it doesn't seem like a very enterprisey language

[abfleishman]

lol. so true! Well I am excited to try it out!

[D3SL]

How will R support be implemented? rpy2 allows for running arbitrary R code directly in python with two-way communication and a persistent R session, opencpu acts like a webserver and can call R from Java, and the RScript CLI command can take the text of a block and run it naively as a raw R script. The last one is the most straightforward, but there's a pretty stiff performance penalty to running library and sourcing calls every block.

You can speed up serialization a ton using the qs package, but then you run into the issue of installing packages on linux. Compiling from source takes hours unless you use the cran2deb4ubuntu repo or Posit's community package manager.

likely free tier, it doesn't seem like a very enterprisey language

@rubenfiszel You would be surprised. The reputation's mostly myth these days. Data.table and Collapse are competitive with Polars and DuckDB in speed, even with huge amounts of data.