athron98 / v8

Embedded JavaScript Engine for R

V8

Embedded JavaScript Engine for R

An R interface to Google's open source JavaScript engine. V8 is written in C++ and implements ECMAScript as specified in ECMA-262, 5th edition. In addition, this package implements typed arrays as specified in ECMA 6 used for high-performance computing and libraries compiled with 'emscripten'.

Documentation

About the R package:

• Vignette: Introduction to V8 for R
• Vignette: Using NPM packages in V8 with browserify

Hello World

# Create a new context
library(V8)
ctx <- v8()

# Evaluate some code
ctx$eval("var foo = 123")
ctx$eval("var bar = 456")
ctx$eval("foo+bar")

# Assign / get objects
ctx$assign("foo", JS("function(x){return x*x}"))
ctx$assign("bar", JS("foo(9)"))
ctx$get("bar")

Call functions from JavaScript libraries

ctx <- V8::v8()
ctx$source("http://coffeescript.org/extras/coffee-script.js")
jscode <- ctx$call("CoffeeScript.compile", "square = (x) -> x * x", list(bare = TRUE))
ctx$eval(jscode)
ctx$call("square", 9)

Installation

Binary packages for OS-X or Windows can be installed directly from CRAN:

install.packages("V8")

Installation from source on Linux requires libv8 3.14 or 3.15 (no newer!). On Debian or Ubuntu use libv8-dev:

sudo apt-get install -y libv8-dev

On Fedora we need v8-devel:

sudo yum install v8-devel

On CentOS / RHEL we install v8-devel via EPEL:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install v8-devel

On OS-X use v8-315 (not regular v8) from Homebrew versions:

brew tap homebrew/versions
brew install v8-315