git clone https://github.com/dandermotj/experimental-r.git
cd experimental-r
docker build -t experimental-r .
docker run experimental-r
Experimental-R contains Dockerfiles for customised R builds. Inspired by the Rocker project, Experimental-R conveniently lets users try out experimental R builds without having to compile R from source themselves.
Thanks to the work of Lionel Henry, the first
Experimental-R image takes the recently released R 3.4 and includes
one killer feature - a native pipe operator |>. No more dependencies
on magrittr's %>%, or confusing tracebacks when pipelines go wrong.
It's probably the most demanded feature to be implemented by R core,
and now it's here (kind of 😏)!
Around one year ago, Lionel wrote a blog post on the called 'The Future of R Syntax?'. In this post he discusses 4 features he implemented in R source:
- a native pipe operator
|> - list brackets
[1, "abc", iris] - lambda notation
[x] -> x*5 - labelled blocks
testthat("blocks") { ... }
I was intrigued by Lionel's work and wanted to try it out myself. Thankfully Lionel published his work on Github. So all I had to do was build R from source, which is not so trivial, especially when building from a git repo (damn you SVN!).
I want users to get excited about features that we could have in future R releases. Ultimately my motivation for doing this is to encourage R core to implement these features in R 4.0. R Core's conservatism has been extremely important in R's establishment and growth. But these features deserve to be first class R features, not just package features; they've proven their usefulness in R and in other languages.
I was hoping to merge all of Lionel's features into one branch and compile a version of R 3.4 with all of them, but unfortunately there were lots of merge conflicts in C files I had no luck resolving. Instead I picked the feature I want the most, the pipe, and maybe in the future with some help we can release an image with the whole lot.
Many thanks to Lionel for his work.