JuliaCall for Seamless Integration of R and Julia

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Package JuliaCall is an R interface to Julia, which is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for numerical computing, see https://julialang.org/ for more information. Below is an image for Mandelbrot set. JuliaCall brings more than 100 times speedup of the calculation! See https://github.com/Non-Contradiction/JuliaCall/tree/master/example/mandelbrot for more information.

Installation

You can install JuliaCall just like any other R packages by

install.packages("JuliaCall")

To use JuliaCall you must have a working installation of Julia. This can be easily done via:

library(JuliaCall)
install_julia()

which will automatically install and setup a version of Julia specifically for use with JuliaCall. Or you can do

library(JuliaCall)
julia_setup(installJulia = TRUE)

which will invoke install_julia automatically if Julia is not found and also do initialization of JuliaCall.

You can also setup Julia manually by downloading a generic binary from https://julialang.org/downloads/ and add it to your path. Currently Julia v0.6.x and the Julia v1.x releases are all supported by JuliaCall.

You can get the development version of JuliaCall by

devtools::install_github("Non-Contradiction/JuliaCall")

Basic Usage

Before using JuliaCall, you need to do initial setup by function julia_setup() for automatic type conversion, Julia display systems, etc. It is necessary for every new R session to use the package. If not carried out manually, it will be invoked automatically before other julia_xxx functions. Solutions to some common error in julia_setup() are documented in the troubleshooting section.

library(JuliaCall)
julia <- julia_setup()
#> Julia version 1.5.0 at location C:\Users\lch34\AppData\Local\JULIAC~1\JULIAC~1\julia\V15~1.0\bin will be used.
#> Loading setup script for JuliaCall...
#> Finish loading setup script for JuliaCall.

## If you want to use `Julia` at a specific location, you could do the following:
## julia_setup(JULIA_HOME = "the folder that contains Julia binary").
## You can also set JULIA_HOME in command line environment or use `options(...)`.

## Different ways of using Julia to calculate sqrt(2)

# julia$command("a = sqrt(2);"); julia$eval("a")
julia_command("a = sqrt(2);"); julia_eval("a")
#> [1] 1.414214
julia_eval("sqrt(2)")
#> [1] 1.414214
julia_call("sqrt", 2)
#> [1] 1.414214
julia_eval("sqrt")(2)
#> [1] 1.414214
julia_assign("x", sqrt(2)); julia_eval("x")
#> [1] 1.414214
julia_assign("rsqrt", sqrt); julia_call("rsqrt", 2)
#> [1] 1.414214
2 %>J% sqrt
#> [1] 1.414214

## You can use `julia$exists` as `exists` in R to test
## whether a function or name exists in Julia or not

julia_exists("sqrt")
#> [1] TRUE
julia_exists("c")
#> [1] FALSE

## Functions related to installing and using Julia packages

julia_install_package_if_needed("Optim")
julia_installed_package("Optim")
#> [1] "0.22.0"
julia_library("Optim")

Troubleshooting and Ways to Get Help

Julia is not found

Make sure the Julia installation is correct. JuliaCall can find Julia on PATH, and there are three ways for JuliaCall to find Julia not on PATH.

libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.xx’ not found

Such problems are usually on Linux machines. The cause for the problem is that R cannot find the libstdc++ version needed by Julia. To deal with the problem, users can export “TheFolderContainsJulia/lib/julia” to R_LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

RCall not properly installed

The issue is usually caused by updates in R, and it can be typically solved by setting rebuild argument to TRUE in julia_setup() as follows.

JuliaCall::julia_setup(rebuild = TRUE)

ERROR: could not load library "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/../bin/../lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/julia/sys.so"

This error happens when Julia is built/installed with MULTIARCH_INSTALL=1, as it is on e.g. Debian. It is caused by the bindir-locating code in jl_init not being multiarch-aware. To work around it, try setting JULIA_BINDIR=/usr/bin in .Renviron.

How to Get Help

julia_help("sqrt")
#> ```
#> sqrt(x)
#> ```
#> 
#> Return $\sqrt{x}$. Throws [`DomainError`](@ref) for negative [`Real`](@ref) arguments. Use complex negative arguments instead. The prefix operator `v` is equivalent to `sqrt`.
#> 
#> # Examples
#> 
#> ```jldoctest; filter = r"Stacktrace:(\n \[[0-9]+\].*)*"
#> julia> sqrt(big(81))
#> 9.0
#> 
#> julia> sqrt(big(-81))
#> ERROR: DomainError with -81.0:
#> NaN result for non-NaN input.
#> Stacktrace:
#>  [1] sqrt(::BigFloat) at ./mpfr.jl:501
#> [...]
#> 
#> julia> sqrt(big(complex(-81)))
#> 0.0 + 9.0im
#> ```
#> 
#> ```
#> sqrt(A::AbstractMatrix)
#> ```
#> 
#> If `A` has no negative real eigenvalues, compute the principal matrix square root of `A`, that is the unique matrix $X$ with eigenvalues having positive real part such that $X^2 = A$. Otherwise, a nonprincipal square root is returned.
#> 
#> If `A` is real-symmetric or Hermitian, its eigendecomposition ([`eigen`](@ref)) is used to compute the square root.   For such matrices, eigenvalues <U+03BB> that appear to be slightly negative due to roundoff errors are treated as if they were zero More precisely, matrices with all eigenvalues `= -rtol*(max |<U+03BB>|)` are treated as semidefinite (yielding a Hermitian square root), with negative eigenvalues taken to be zero. `rtol` is a keyword argument to `sqrt` (in the Hermitian/real-symmetric case only) that defaults to machine precision scaled by `size(A,1)`.
#> 
#> Otherwise, the square root is determined by means of the Björck-Hammarling method [^BH83], which computes the complex Schur form ([`schur`](@ref)) and then the complex square root of the triangular factor.
#> 
#> [^BH83]: Åke Björck and Sven Hammarling, "A Schur method for the square root of a matrix", Linear Algebra and its Applications, 52-53, 1983, 127-140. [doi:10.1016/0024-3795(83)80010-X](https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3795(83)80010-X)
#> 
#> # Examples
#> 
#> ```jldoctest
#> julia> A = [4 0; 0 4]
#> 2×2 Array{Int64,2}:
#>  4  0
#>  0  4
#> 
#> julia> sqrt(A)
#> 2×2 Array{Float64,2}:
#>  2.0  0.0
#>  0.0  2.0
#> ```

JuliaCall for R Package Developers

If you are interested in developing an R package which is an interface for a Julia package, JuliaCall is an ideal choice. You only need to find the Julia function or Julia module you want to have in R, using the module, and julia_call the function. There are some examples:

If you have any issues in developing an R package using JuliaCall, you may report it using the link: https://github.com/Non-Contradiction/JuliaCall/issues/new, or email me at lch34677@gmail.com or cxl508@psu.edu.

Suggestion, Issue Reporting, and Contributing

JuliaCall is under active development now. Any suggestion or issue reporting is welcome! You may report it using the link: https://github.com/Non-Contradiction/JuliaCall/issues/new, or email me at lch34677@gmail.com or cxl508@psu.edu. You are welcome to use the issue template and the pull request template. The contributing guide provides some guidance for making contributions.

Checking JuliaCall Package

To check and test the JuliaCall package, you need to have the source package. You can

Other Interfaces Between R and Julia

License

JuliaCall is licensed under MIT.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the JuliaCall project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Citing

If you use JuliaCall in research that resulted in publications, then please cite the JuliaCall paper using the following BibTeX entry:

@Article{JuliaCall,
    author = {Changcheng Li},
    title = {{JuliaCall}: an {R} package for seamless integration between {R} and {Julia}},
    journal = {The Journal of Open Source Software},
    publisher = {The Open Journal},
    year = {2019},
    volume = {4},
    number = {35},
    pages = {1284},
    doi = {10.21105/joss.01284},
  }