From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-10-16T14:50:01+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] RSRuby 0.4

ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, Alex Gutteridge wrote:
> 
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I have released a new version of RSRuby on rubyforge today:
>>
>> http://rubyforge.org/projects/rsruby/
>>
>> RSRuby allows the user to embed a full R interpreter into a Ruby
>> script. This allows the script to call any R function and convert the
>> result back into Ruby. From the R website: 'R is a free software
>> environment for statistical computing and graphics.'. Running a
>> students t-test (or any other R function) is as simple as:
>>
>>  require 'rsruby'
>>  r=RSRuby.instance        #Create R interpreter
>>  ttest = r.t_test([1,2,3])        #Convert [1,2,3] to R. Run t.test
>> function and convert result back to Ruby
>>  puts ttest['p.value']        #Prints out p.value statistic from the
>> ttest object
>>
>> In this new release, the whole codebase has been moved over to an RPy
>> (http://rpy.sourceforge.net/) derived core, which has resulted in some
>> changes and new features as well as improved stability. Documentation
>> is still patchy, though there are some examples included in the
>> release and an almost complete conversion of the RPy test suite. A
>> better manual/tutorial is on my list of things for the next release,
>> until then the RPy manual may help.
>>
>> Dr Alex Gutteridge
>> Post-Doctoral Researcher
>>
>> Bioinformatics Center
>> Institute for Chemical Research
>> Kyoto University
>> Gokasho, Uji, Kyoto 611-0011
>> Japan
> 
> insanely cool stuff alex!
> 
> -a

Yeah ... maybe this will save me the trouble of getting the SWIG stuff
working. Actually, though, I have been able to build a SWIG-wrapped R
shared library, after about a week of wrestling with the header files,
but I haven't had a chance to try out any test cases, so I have no idea
what it will do.

In the long run, I think I still want to do the SWIG wrapping, because,
at least for simple libraries, it's scripting-language agnostic. You do
one set of interface files and you can access your library from Ruby,
Python, Perl, PHP (4), a couple of Schemes, Lua, Pike (whatever *that*
is), Java and one variant of Common Lisp (clisp IIRC).

Incidentally, my version of R also builds a shared LAPACK. I think it's
the FORTRAN-callable version, though, not the C-callable version. I
haven't been able to find a full Ruby/LAPACK interface. There's a piece
of it in the Ruby GSL package, and another version in something called
"linalg". I haven't been able to get "linalg" to build, though.