Understanding FastR – the R Truffle interpreter

GraalVM provides an R Truffle interpreter for a GNU-compatible R runtime. This runtime supports R programs and REPL (read-eval-print-loop) mode, where we can rapidly test the code while we write the code interactively. FastR is the project that developed this R runtime.

Installing and running R

Just like Graal Python, the R runtime does not come with GraalVM by default. We have to download and install it using Graal Updater. Use the following command to download and install R and Rscript:

gu install r

To run R, we need the OpenMP runtime library. This can be installed using apt-get install libcomp1 on Ubuntu and yum install libcomp on Oracle Linux. The library is installed in macOS by default. Apart from this, you will need C/C++/Fortran, if the R code has C/C++/Fortran code. R is also in the experimental phase at the time of writing this book, so not everything is supported yet. Please refer to the GraalVM documentation...