gRPC for the R programming language

[Jim Sheldon]

Hello!

Are there plans to add gRPC to the R language?

It would help coordinate work between software and science.

Thanks,

Jim

[Richard Belleville]

The core gRPC team does not currently have plans to extend support to R. Frankly, this is the first request I've heard for R support. If there is a need here, we'd love to hear more about it.

With that said, gRPC is an open protocol and the gRPC Core codebase is open source. The C++ Core API is designed specifically for use with foreign function interfaces like R's. This is how we implemented Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. My gut says that getting a basic client working is about the size of a weekend project. We'd be happy to give you (or anyone else) the guidance you'd need to get that off the ground.

Thanks,

Richard Belleville

gRPC Team

[Jim Sheldon]

Thanks for replying so quickly!

R support would fill a need in the community I support (epi). Happy to discuss more, right now in the prototyping and planning phase (distributed pathogen tracking system).

And thanks for sharing those resources! I will need to take a look more, and am happy to both get my hands dirty and get any additional guidance that's easily provided/readily available.

Jim

[Ruan Spies]

Such a delight to see this thread! We've also recently developed a need for this in R and are also happy to get involved and pull in some of our team as well.

We operate primarily in the financial services space. Quite a lot of people that we speak to, primarily actuaries, are big on R. We (Alis Exchange) aim to empower business teams to build their own Cloud Native services, rather than having to go through IT departments, by building out a various utilities on top of Protocol Buffers and GCP. We are all in on gRPC and believe that it is the best way to design and build, but us and our clients are unable to truly use it.

On the client side, a workaround has been to simply to do HTTP transcoding and let people hit the HTTP endpoint, rather than using gRPC. With this, you obviously lose the type definitions that are extremely valuable.

The bigger need is definitely being able to implement a server in R. We want to enable business people to take their R scripts and formally make it available as services, rather than just code on local devices. 

We have explored some of the packages people have built, but for anyone who has extensively used gRPC in supported languages, the developer experience is horrible - something that is officially supported, or at least has proper community support, would be of great value.

We really see a HUGE opportunity in helping business convert their R scripts into proper APIs using gRPC and think that we will be able to drive adoption of this in the financial industry.

[Jim Sheldon]

Hello!

Our bigger need is for a server in R as well.

Happy to receive any and all guidance on how I could get started!

Thanks again,

Jim

[Sanjit Rath]

I came across this thread while searching for R support for gRPC. We are looking for ways to integrate R & Python, and Arrow libraries in between. I am good at C++ as well and have been through the gRPC stub generation code. Can someone from grpc.io please guide me here? I would be happy to get involved and support the RPort of the gRPC libraries. 

[Jan Krynauw]

Agree on this!

We deal quite a bit with Financial Analysts, Actuaries and Accountants and the world of R Scripts is massive.  Moving traditional python scripts to Proto defined and implemented using gRPC has been amazing.  It would be incredible to be able to transform the world of R into this pattern as well.

[Jan Krynauw]

Not sure whether this is allowed, but we are willing to reward anyone able to look into this: https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~01699f5b31ffbebb9b

[Udit Ranasaria]

My company is also very much interested in using gRPC for microservices with R code in it!