Go 1.9

[bachmeier via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 17:43:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> R is done (thanks bachmeier)

Integration with R is largely complete, but the missing piece has 
always been lack of Windows support, which meant it wasn't an 
option for most users.

Just this morning I got things working on Windows. Now that all 
three major platforms have support, it is as reasonable to create 
an R package with D functions as C, C++ or Fortran. Anyone can 
write up a library of D functions and put a package on Bitbucket 
or Github. The R user doesn't even need to know which language 
the functions are written in.

This could possibly lead to wider adoption of D. Right now Rcpp 
is the most popular dependency for R packages (over 1000 at last 
check). And that's only a tiny fraction of overall Rcpp usage; 
many users write their own C++ code but don't upload a package to 
CRAN. It is my belief that these statisticians and 
econometricians and biologists - few of whom have a C++ 
background or know what a GC is - are open to a language like D. 
I plan to write a post on my website demonstrating usage soon.

On my agenda next are interoperability with Julia and Octave 
(which isn't that popular, but would make a lot of Matlab code 
available inside D). I honestly don't know if this will bring in 
new D users, but for the most part I don't care, because I'm 
doing it for my own research. Nonetheless, I think the potential 
to expand the D userbase is there.