F# R Type Provider

The F# Type Provider is a mechanism that enables smooth interoperability between F# and R. The Type Provider discovers R packages that are available in your R installation and makes them available as .NET namespaces underneath the parent namespace RProvider.

The Type Provider makes it possible to use all of R capabilities, from the F# interactive environment. It enables on-the-fly charting and data analysis using R packages, with the added benefit of IntelliSense over R, and compile-time type-checking that the R functions you are using exist. It allows you to leverage all of .NET libraries, as well as F# unique capabilities to access and manipulate data from a wide variety of sources via Type Providers.

A Quick Demo

What are R and F#?

F# is a mixed-paradigm language that supports functional, object-oriented and imperative programming, with the emphasis on functional. F# runs on the .NET runtime and is a compiled, statically typed language with a strong type system and type inference. F# is a general purpose programming language, and is particularly well-suited for scientific/numerical computing.

R is an Open Source language for statistical computing. R offers a wide range of high-quality, community-developed packages, covering virtually every area of statistics, econometrics or machine learning. It is also famous for its charting capabilities, making it a great tool to produce publication-quality graphics. R is an interpreted, dynamically typed language that is typically used from its GUI, RStudio, or command line interactive environment.

Using the R Type Provider

Install using the NuGet package. Run the following command in the Package Manager Console:

PM> Install-Package RProvider

Pre-requisites

The R Provider requires an installation of R for Windows, downloadable from here. RProvider uses the R registry key SOFTWARE\R-core to locate the R binary directory, in order to load R.dll. It will also locate R.dll if it is on the path. If run from a 32-bit process, RProvider will use the 32-bit R.dll, and if run from a 64-bit process, it will load the 64-bit version. (Note that VS runs in 32-bit process, so you must have installed 32-bit version of R for Windows if you want IntelliSense to work)

If you are using R 2.15 or later, you should not try to load the RProvider inside a script that is passed to FSI via the --use flag. It seems that something about the way R initializes causes it to hang in that context. Works fine if you load later.

For compilation you will need VS2012 / F# 3.0 or later. For runtime you'll need .NET 4.5.

Contributing and copyright

The project has been developed by BlueMountain Capital and contributors. It is available under the BSD license. The library uses RDotNet which is also covered by the BSD license. For more information see the License file in the GitHub repository.

The project is hosted on GitHub where you can report issues, fork the project and submit pull requests. Many thanks to Mathias Brandewinder for producing the FAKE script to build the NuGet package, and to Steffen Forkman for writing FAKE.