FRESH

Hacker News

WebR – R in the Browser

108 points by creata

by maxi-k

1 subcomments

This is an awesome project. We recently used it to build a statically hosted EC2 instance comparison website, using this for plotting (ggplot2) and DuckDB-Wasm for querying the instance data. Only the first page load is slow b/c of all the wasm and R packages, but it's fast for interactive querying and plotting and was really easy to create.

by stateofinquiry

5 subcomments

Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done.
However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.
So, I am a strange combination of impressed with this site and confounded trying to figure out why it exists. I'm probably missing something.

by dash2

1 subcomments

Impressively, this managed to download the large nycflights13 library very quickly, and run a regression on its multimillion-row data in just a second or two.

by kasperset

0 subcomment

I use R a lot but I still prefer Javascript libraries for interactivity. Javascript libraries feels lot more smoother than something like webR. Having said that, it is impressive that R is able to transcend in the interactivity with just internet browser.

by droelf

0 subcomment

Cool! Emscripten-forge also recently got a R distribution that runs natively on the browser: https://blog.jupyter.org/r-in-the-browser-announcing-our-web...

by tkschmidtme

0 subcomment

WebR is awesome and I’m trying to use it more and more instead of in operating fixed figures (https://tkschmidt.me/posts/dagstuhl-problem/). I would really recommend to stay with a fixed webR version (and use a CI/CD) process to check if newer versions are still compatible with your scripts.

by juujian

2 subcomments

by gavmor

1 subcomments

by motohagiography

0 subcomment

there should be another "browser" with better observability features. wasm is turning browsers into a hypervisor for virtual machines that run containers for a variety of languages now, including R.
great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.