Funded ISC Grants (2020-2)

The R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee periodically solicits proposals from the worldwide R community for projects which will help advance the state of the R ecosystem. Developers and organizations may apply to participate in the program and receive funding to help further a project or initiative.

Grants funded in this group:

Development and maintenance of the Windows build infrastructure (Top level project proposal)

Funded:
$46,800

Proposed by:
Jeroen Ooms

Summary:
As of R 4.0.0 (released April 2020), R for Windows uses a brand new toolchain bundle called rtools40. This version upgrades the mingw-gcc toolchains to version 8.3.0, and introduces a powerful new build system based on the widely used msys2 platform, which makes it easier to maintain R itself, as well as system libraries needed for developing R and R-packages.

The current project seeks to build out this system to improve tooling for building and debugging on Windows, and move towards a scalable build infrastructure, which is transparent, extensible, and fully automated. Thereby we can empower development on Windows, and support further growth of the R ecosystem while relieving work for CRAN and R-core members.

Interactive visualisations in R via R-to-JavaScript-transpilation

Funded:
$9,688

Proposed by:
Chun Fung Kwok

Website:
https://github.com/kcf-jackson/sketch and https://cran.r-project.org/package=sketch

Summary:
This project aims to make creating flexible interactive visualisation accessible to a wider R community. By implementing an R-to-JavaScript transpiler, i.e. a program that translates R code into JavaScript code, it lets R users develop JavaScript(JS) applications using solely the R syntax. This eliminates the need to pick up an entire new language, makes it easy for R users to learn and experiment with JS technologies and gives direct and full access to all existing JS libraries. The transpiler is distributed as a regular R package, and it can be used standalone or to complement existing packages, including Rmarkdown, shiny and V8.