WebR – R in the Browser

I use R a lot but I still prefer Javascript libraries for interactivity. Javascript libraries feels lot more smoother than something like webR. Having said that, it is impressive that R is able to transcend in the interactivity with just internet browser.

Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done.

However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.

So, I am a strange combination of impressed with this site and confounded trying to figure out why it exists. I'm probably missing something.

This is an awesome project. We recently used it to build a statically hosted EC2 instance comparison website, using this for plotting (ggplot2) and DuckDB-Wasm for querying the instance data. Only the first page load is slow b/c of all the wasm and R packages, but it's fast for interactive querying and plotting and was really easy to create.

Impressively, this managed to download the large nycflights13 library very quickly, and run a regression on its multimillion-row data in just a second or two.

Can R be meaningfully run against datasets small enough to fit in the browser?

Would be interesting to see if we can run shiny entirely client side with this.