Integrating R with C++: Rcpp, RInside, and RProtobuf

Last week the R “intergrouplet” at Google invited Dirk Eddelbuettel and Romain Francois to come and give a Tech Talk about their joint work on Rcpp, RInside, and RProtoBuf. Dirk and Romain agreed and also let us share the video of their talk:



We were also happy to have John Chambers, creator of the S programming language and member of the R Core team, join us for the talk and discussions afterward.

At Google we use a lot of C++ and an increasing amount of R for data analysis, so the Rcpp package is very interesting to us as a modern type-safe way to write R packages that interface with other Google technologies written in C++. Likewise, the RProtoBuf package makes it easy for analysts and engineers to use R with Protocol Buffers read from Bigtable or other data stores.

By Murray Stokely, Quantitative Engineering Team