Overview of R

Read about R, its history, connections to other languages, and alternatives for statistical computing. You will also learn about various interfaces that can be used to edit and run R code, such as RStudio.

Implementations

The main R implementation is written in R, C, and Fortran. Several other implementations are aimed at improving speed or increasing extensibility. A closely related implementation is pqR (pretty quick R) by Radford M. Neal, with improved memory management and support for automatic multithreading. Renjin and FastR are Java implementations of R for use in a Java Virtual Machine. CXXR, rho, and Riposte are implementations of R in C++. Renjin, Riposte, and pqR attempt to improve performance by using multiple cores and deferred evaluation. Most of these alternative implementations are experimental and incomplete, with relatively few users, compared to the main implementation maintained by the R Development Core Team.

TIBCO, who previously sold the commercial implementation S-PLUS, built a runtime engine called TERR, which is part of Spotfire.

Microsoft R Open (MRO) is a fully compatible R distribution with modifications for multi-threaded computations. As of 30 June 2021, Microsoft started to phase out MRO in favor of the CRAN distribution.