SHF: PROJECT DARWIN_ Towards Principled Language Evolution

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

R is a large language ecosystem consisting of statistical and graphical capabilities, a programming language, and all the other artifacts present in an open source programming environment. R is used by millions of scientific/engineering programmers in academia and is used heavily in business and industry. R is hitting limits and needs major renovations if it is to keep up with, and advance, the pace of science. This proposal proposes to modernize several aspects of the R language and to integrate new infrastructure elements. The modernization effort will focus on the code base of the language implementation, the compiler and the memory subsystem. The new features will center around the addition of type annotations to improve correctness and performance of R programs as well as to assist with distributed execution. The PI is well-connected to the R core developers, and there is a clear path to releasing versions into production. The enhancements will help R support the pace of science, as problems become more computationally complex and use rapidly growing data sets. Scientific computations programmed in R will run faster, be capable of processing much larger, distributed data sets, and the implementation will be easier to maintain by modernizing the language. The experience of reimplementing a live, full-scale language like R will be interesting to the programming language research community, as well as providing a more sustainable infrastructure for science/engineering programming.