I’m wondering about the best way to deploy R. Matlab has the “matlab compiler” (MCR). There has been discussion about something similar in the past for R that would compile R into C or C++. Does anyone have any experience with the R to C Compiler (RCC) that was developed by John Garvin at Rice?
I’ve looked into it, and it seems to be the only project that worked on compiling R code into executable code. And as far as I can tell, it isn’t still being used.
[Edit 1:]: To be clear, I know that there are C and C++ (and Java, Python, etc.) interfaces to R (rJava, rcpp, Rpy, etc.). I’m wondering about specific ways to compile and deploy R code without installing R in advance.
[Edit 2:]: John Mellor-Crummey tells me that they’re still working on RCC and hope to make it available in 4 months or so (at the earliest). I’ll update this further if I find anything else out.
A byte code compiler will be part of the R 2.13 release. By default it is not used in this release but it is available; I expect the 2.14 release will by default byte compile all base and recommended packages. The compiler::compile help page and the R Installation and Administration Manual give some more details.