R package for accessing .NET
Accessing the Common Language Runtime (.NET or Mono) from the R statistical software, in-process.
As of September 2015, the source code snapshot of tagged releases can be found via the release tab of the rClr GitHub repository. Binary R packages for Windows cannot be released via github, and you can get them from https://rclr.codeplex.com.
You can install pre-compiled rClr for Windows via https://rclr.codeplex.com. You can use from the command line R CMD INSTALL rclr_0.8.zip where R points to one of the R.exe installed on your machine, or from R itself install.packages('c:/path/to/rclr_0.8.zip')
Installing on Linux is always installing from source anyway, be it from a tarball, cloning the repo, or using devtools.
rClr is not your average R package and requires a few more tools than is typical for most R packages.
On Windows you will need a C# and C and/or Visual C++ compiler. Using the Visual Studio 2013 toolchain is recommended. Read the current build instructions. Note that as of September 2015 using Mono on Windows is not maintained.
A Linux distribution with R, g++ and the Mono toolchain (including xbuild) should work. Note that while a range of Mono versions in the 3.X series may work, I recommend you use versions 3.8 or above. This may require you to look for adequate versions (for instance Debian is lagging behind currently). You may want to have a look at the instructions at the mono download page for Linux and use the Xamarin packages.
You should be able to install the package using the install_github function of the package devtools. The following commands have been tested successfully on Windows with VS2013 and Linux with Mono 3.10, on 2014-12-19.
# Optionally you may remove a prior package
remove.packages('rClr')
library(devtools)
install_github("jmp75/rClr", build_vignettes=TRUE)NOTE: you must have a fully working devtools package. If devtools, on loading, reports a warning about not finding a suitable version of RTools (on Windows), this may prevent it from installing rClr. The issue has been seen for instance using devtools 1.7.0, installed from CRAN, via R 3.2.2. Package devtools 1.7.0 seems to require RTools 3.1, even when run from R 3.2.2. One way to overcome this is to install devtools from a more recent download, from its github repository.
The package contains documentation, code sample and a vignette to get started.
library(rClr)
?rClr
# There is an HTML vignette:
browseVignettes('rClr')You will otherwise find some documentation at https://r2clr.codeplex.com/documentation
While this package is sometimes used for the author's paid day job, this is largely a personal endeavour. Support is appreciated in many forms.
- Citations: As of December 2014, A presentation given at the R user conference 2013. A journal paper will, hmm, "soon" follow.
- Documentation: reporting issues, feature requests or discussion threads as such can be very valuable material if done well.
- Consulting or contract work is an option that may be arranged.
A few packages using rClr are publicly accessible, and may be of interest if you want to build your own package with dependencies on rClr.
- If you are interested in environmental modelling: RtoTIME is a package that depends on rClr
- rsqlserver is an Sql Server driver database interface (DBI) driver for R
- A package to access optimization tools on .NET