DasBetterR

[bachmeier]

I've been using D and R together for a decade. I wrote [a blog 
post for the D 
Blog](https://dlang.org/blog/2020/01/27/d-for-data-science-calling-r-from-d/) on the eve of the pandemic. I released the [embedrv2 library](https://github.com/bachmeil/embedrv2) in late 2021. It's useful for writing D functions that are called from R, using D's metaprogramming to write the necessary bindings for you.

My programs usually take the opposite approach, where D is the 
primary language, and I call into R to fill in missing 
functionality. I've accumulated a large collection of code 
snippets to enable all kinds of things. The problem is that they 
were scattered across many projects, there was no consistency 
across programs, documentation didn't exist, and they were more 
or less useless to anyone other than me.

[This Github repo](https://github.com/bachmeil/betterr) includes 
D modules, tests demonstrating most of the functionality, 
documentation, and some posts about how I do specific things. I'm 
sharing publicly all the things I've been doing in case it has 
value to anyone else.

Examples of functionality:

- Creating, accessing, and mutating R data structures, including 
vector, matrix, data frame, list, array, and time series types. 
Reference counting handles memory management.
- Basic statistical functionality like calculating the mean. Many 
of these functions use Mir for efficiency.
- Linear algebra
- Random number generation and sampling
- Parallel random number generation
- Numerical optimization: direct access to the C libraries used 
by R's optim function
- Quadratic programming
- Passing D functions to R without creating a shared library. For 
example, you can use a D function as the objective function you 
pass to constrOptim for constrained optimization problems.

[Project website](https://bachmeil.github.io/betterr/)

There's more detail on the website, but I used the name "Better 
R" because the entirety of R is available inside your D program 
and you can use D to improve on it as much as you'd like. Feel 
free to hate the name.

I was originally going to include all of this as part of 
embedrv2, but realized there was almost no overlap between the 
two use cases. Moreover, it would be strange to call R from D and 
call D functions from R in the same program. It simplifies things 
to keep them in different projects.

If you try it and have problems, you can [create a 
discussion](https://github.com/bachmeil/betterr/discussions). You 
can also post in this forum, but I won't guarantee I'll see it.