Skip to content

FastR - GraalVM Community Edition 19.3.0

Choose a tag to compare

View all tags
@ezzarghili ezzarghili released this 20 Nov 16:22
· 2436 commits to master since this release
vm-19.3.0
afcc8dc

FastR is a GNU R compatible implementation of R for GraalVM. It is currently based on R 3.5.1, reuses the base packages of GNU R and is compatible with the ecosystem.

For example, FastR can install and run unmodified complex R packages like ggplot2, Shiny, or Rcpp, for compatibility with other packages please refer to the compatibility checker: http://www.graalvm.org/docs/reference-manual/compatibility/.

Being implemented on top of GraalVM, FastR uses its state-of-the-art JIT compiler and has better peak performance, often several times faster than GNU R.

The R language components can be installed in GraalVM using the gu utility.

More information is available on the GraalVM website: http://www.graalvm.org/docs/reference-manual/languages/r/

Changes in 19.3.0:

  • FastR has been updated to R version 3.6.1.
  • In this release, FastR does not ship with GCC runtime libraries. Use the following commands to install the necessary dependencies:
    • Ubuntu 18.04 and 19.04: apt-get install libgfortran3 libgomp1
    • Oracle Linux 7: yum install libgfortran libgomp
    • Oracle Linux 8: yum install compat-libgfortran-48
    • MacOS: brew install [email protected]
  • Preview of support for LLVM based execution of R native extensions.
    • FastR is configured to use the GraalVM LLVM toolchain to compile the C/C++ and Fortran code of R packages. The resulting binaries will contain both the native code and the LLVM bitcode. The R packages that are shipped with FastR were also compiled using the GraalVM LLVM toolchain and their binaries contain the LLVM bitcode.
    • FastR loads and runs the R extensions native code by default, but when run with the option --R.BackEnd=llvm, it will load and run the LLVM bitcode if available. You can use the LLVM backend selectively for specific R packages via --R.BackEndLLVM=pkg1,pkg2.
    • If you encounter any issues when installing R packages, you can switch back from the GraalVM LLVM toolchain to the native toolchain by running fastr.setToolchain("native") or by manually editing the $FASTR_HOME/etc/Makeconf file.
  • Fixed memory leaks reported on GitHub.
  • Fixed failures when working with large vectors (>1GB).
  • Implemented grepRaw, but only for fixed=T.

We encourage the users to experiment with the new LLVM support and report any issues. To see the complete list of changes, please refer to the project changelog.

Assets 6
Loading