The future of R

In the following brief sections, we are going to try to imagine how R may develop within the next several years to facilitate Big, Fast, and Smart data processing.

Big Data

We hope that by reading this book you have gained an appreciation for the R language and what can potentially be achieved by integrating it with currently available Big Data tools. As the last few years have brought us many new Big Data technologies, it has to be said that the full connectivity of R with these new frameworks may take some time. The availability of approaches utilizing R to process large datasets on a single machine is still quite limited due to traditional limitations of the R language itself. The ultimate solution to this problem may only be achieved by defining the language from scratch, but this is obviously an extreme and largely impractical idea. There is a lot of hope associated with Microsoft R Open, but as these are still quite early days for this new distribution, we need to wait...