R and nimrod

[Kevin Ushey]

Hi everyone,

nimrod (http://nimrod-lang.org/) is shaping up to be a really nice programming language, similar to C but with more flexibility.

One thing that is really nice is that it interfaces with R quite easily -- because nimrod files can compile to C, and nimrod comes with a very easy to use FFI for C programs, it's simple to build R packages using nimrod source code (with compilation steps that can easily be automated).

I have an example package up at https://github.com/kevinushey/nimrod -- you can test it with

    devtools::install_github("kevinushey/nimrod", local = FALSE) ## forces an R CMD build first

    library(nimrod)

    test_hello()

Of course, you will need nimrod installed -- this is easy on Mac with homebrew, e.g. 'brew install nimrod'. I am sure you can find it in Debian / other repositories as well, otherwise you can install the binaries or build from source at http://nimrod-lang.org/download.html.

Anyway, nimrod looks like a nice language, and it looks to be easy to integrate with R, so I'd be curious if anyone else would be interested in playing around with something like this.