From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2010-12-22T08:18:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and science ?


On Dec 21, 2010, at 06:09 , Jose Hales-Garcia wrote:

> On Dec 21, 2010, at 12:15 AM, timr <timrandg@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> If I did a
>> lot of data crunching/graphing, I might write a DSL that allowed R
>> plotting code to be made via a nicer ruby-like syntax, but so far I
>> haven't been motivated enough.
> 
> Curious if you've used RinRuby and what  you think of it?

I've had good success with rsruby. It isn't the nicest or terribly complete, but by embedding R it is a LOT faster (10x by my measurements) than calling out to R and running R scripts. Usually I'm just doing:

  RSRuby.instance.eval_R r_src

But there is API to do data conversion back/forth. I found it to be a bit clunky and in some cases buggy, but for the most part I'm usually just using R for visualization, not lots of data transfer.