If I Only Had The Time....

Other things I'd like to do with R if I had the time (if someone else needs a project, I won't mind :-) )

1. A JITer for R to extend Luke's Bytecode stuff. I would say something along the lines of a binding so, say GNU Lightning. Now that function pointers can exist as R objects for use in .Call you'd create an EXTPTRSXP that protects the RAWSXP holding the generated code.

2. Finish up my libffi interface for R. I wrote one of these just after DSC2003. It probably still even works since libffi doesn't drift very much. It would probably be nicer if it was integrated with TypeInfo though. It also let you write R functions that appear to be C function pointers (for use as callbacks for example), though this has issues in multithreaded environments.


3. A centralized object database. One of the things I actually like about S-PLUS is the persistent database notion. I often have little pieces of code (for example my alpha function) that I stash away in scripts and places and then promptly lose. It would be nice to have a little database, perhaps with versioning, that you could easily tag and search. Hell, it could even sync with something online.

4. GData for R. I think it would be cool to be able to access Google Spreadsheets from R. It could be a pretty slick way of distributing data easily. If there was a way to hook it up to Google Docs for documentation and description through the help system that would also be cool. You'd probably have to use RCurl as the back end to get https support. I've started this one a couple of times but I don't really have a pressing need so I end up putting it on the back burner.

5. A complete dbxml interface. Again, I have chunks of this one, but never finished it (I ended up just using pipe() and the command-line tool). DBXML is pretty handy if you have a massive XML file (say a FlowJo workspace) and you only need a teensy tiny little chunk (like the gating strategy).

6. R on Rails! Okay, that might be a little silly (though I wonder how I would do R mixins...)

7. GPU backend. Actually, with the advent of CUDA you could probably do this pretty easily a la the Matrix package.

8. R/Flash (or Flex) interface. Plots as SWF anyone? Do it right and you could use it to serve up things in Flex/Apollo apps. I suppose you could also do a XAML one?