Pandas like features

[data pulverizer]

On Thursday, 5 November 2020 at 22:02:25 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 November 2020 at 20:22:45 UTC, data pulverizer 
> wrote:
>
>> 1. If I had to do this, I would first decide on a collection 
>> of common data structures to share starting with 
>> *compositions* of R/Python/Julia style multi-dimensional 
>> arrays - contiguous arrays with basic element types with a 
>> dimensional information in form of another array. So a 2x3 
>> double matrix is a double array of length 6 with another long 
>> array containing [2, 3]. R has externalptr, Julia can 
>> interface with pointers, as can Python.
>
> R has externalptr, but to my knowledge, that's only for 
> transporting around C objects. I don't know of any way to call 
> R API functions with data not allocated by R.

Yes but you make C calls in R on the pointed object. Given the 
choice that's how I would write any application in R. The only 
purpose R would serve is as an interface to the underlying dlls. 
I have many years of writing code in R and from my experience, 
apart from minor instances I would try to avoid writing 
production libraries or code in it.