#Rjava in r ac portable#
#Rjava in r ac code#

#Rjava in r ac code#

Interoperability has the major advantage of avoiding code replication across different languages and thereby it decreases the maintenance effort, since only one version of the source code exists. This idea of making calls between different languages is referred to as interoperability ( Epperly et al., 2012). When dealing with complex models, invoking native Java or C++ code directly in R can result in a significant gain in computational time compared to translating the code and running it directly in the R environment. One thing for sure, these two languages are faster than R, mainly because of their implementation ( Wickham, 2014, Ch.

However, the JVM technology has improved over time and the two languages now show a comparable performance in some contexts ( Vivanco & Pizzi, 2002 Costanza, Herzeel & Verachtert, 2019), even though it is still widely accepted that C++ is slightly faster than Java. In terms of performance, the first versions of Java were considered to be slower than C++. In practice, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) comes with the Java installation package. This virtual machine makes the interface between the operating system (OS) and the Java code.

#Rjava in r ac portable#

Compared to other languages, Java has the advantage of being highly portable thanks to a virtual machine technology. According to different surveys, Java counts among the five most popular languages in computer programming ( GitHub, 2018 Stack Overflow, 2018 Tiobe, 2020). Object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java are better suited for this task since they allow for encapsulation and polymorphism ( Schildt, 2007, Ch. Some scientific problems, especially those involving modelling, require complex object-oriented implementation and computational performance that can hardly be achieved in R. 16) and it is now widely used by the scientific community. This interpreted language was primarily designed for data analysis and statistics ( Wickham, 2014, Ch. It has been recently ranked the tenth most popular language according to the TIOBE index ( Tiobe, 2020). The R language ( Venables & Smith, 2020) has gained in popularity over the last decades. The project is hosted on SourceForge and the source code is available at The betadiv package provides a simple example of package development based on J4R. The documentation of the classes listed in Table 3 is available at. The lerfob-foresttools and repicea Java libraries used in the third application example are hosted on SourceForge at and The J4R package and j4r Java library are licensed under GPL 3.0 and LGPL 3.0, respectively.Īll the examples in article, the benchmark test, and the fictitious plot used in the third application example are available in the Supplemental Files. The source code of the J4R package and the j4r Java library is freely available at. The following information was supplied regarding data availability: DOI: 10.7717/peerj-cs.300/supp-2 Data Availability Statement