[GSoC] [gsoc-proposal] fastR/Java

[Alberto Arrigoni]

Hello everybody, 
we have submitted a Gsoc project focused on FastR, an implementation of the R programming language in Java using AST interpretation and specialisation for improved performance.
Any comment or question on this is more than welcome
Cheers,
Alberto Arrigoni

Integrate basic Bioconductor functionalities in fastr (Java/R)

Rationale
R is a free software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Nevertheless, R is hard to mantain and evolve, lacks Java portability and is characterized by low performances. The FastR project (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2013vitek-2013524.pdf) aims to rethink how to implement R, by leveraging well tested technologies to build a high performance VM. FastR is an implementation of the R programming language in Java using AST interpretation and specialisation for improved performance. The implementation has been extended to support JIT compilation, leading to performance improvements.
The fastR project has been presented to the useR! conference 2013, and it is now actively developed at https://bitbucket.org/allr/fastr.

Approach
The goal of this project would be to carry on the FastR development by expanding the set of supported R data types, possibly integrating some basic functionalities from Bioconductor which will be expanded in the future.

Required skills
Moderate technical difficulty, an interest in statistical problem solving is a plus but not essential.

Reference to other projects: R, BioJava, Jruby

(Possible) mentors: Jan Vitek, Alberto Arrigoni