R

The R statistical language on the Wippy runtime. Call R from Lua and get native Lua values back — no external process, no network. R runs as a resident, warm instance inside the Wippy sandbox.

Under the hood it is real GNU R 4.6.1 — the interpreter, base and recommended packages, OpenBLAS (WASM SIMD kernels) under R's LAPACK, and a curated statistical stack (tidyverse, poLCA, glmnet, flexmix, MASS, Matrix, survival, …) — compiled to a single WebAssembly module. Results are bit-identical to CRAN R.

Quickstart

wippy add wippy-langs/r
wippy install

Declare the SDK in your entry's imports (r: r:sdk), then:

local r = require("r")

r.eval("mean(1:100)").result          -- 50.5
r.eval("R.version.string").result     -- "R version 4.6.1 (2026-06-24)"

-- named bindings: one string-keyed table binds each key as an R variable
r.eval("x + y", { x = 1, y = 3 }).result                        -- 4

-- positional args bind to the R list `argv` (never string-spliced)
r.eval("argv[[1]] + argv[[2]]", 3, 4).result                    -- 7
r.eval("paste(argv[[1]], toupper(argv[[2]]))", "hi", "there").result  -- "hi THERE"

-- a real model
r.eval("round(coef(lm(dist ~ speed, cars)), 3)").result         -- {-17.579, 3.932}

-- a real plot: PNG bytes, rendered headless (cairo + bundled fonts)
r.plot("plot(mtcars$wt, mtcars$mpg); abline(lm(mpg ~ wt, mtcars))",
       { width = 800, height = 600, dpi = 96 }).result

Every r.eval returns { stdout, stderr, error, result }. result is the value of the last expression decoded to a native Lua object; error is nil, or the R error message when R raised one; stderr carries warnings/messages (fd-2), with the error message only in error.

What you get

• The whole language. Arithmetic, vectors/matrices, data.frame, closures, S3/S4, the apply family, regex, dates — bit-identical to CRAN R 4.6.1.
• Real statistics. lm/glm, distributions (d/p/q/r*), prcomp, LAPACK linear algebra on OpenBLAS SIMD kernels, plus poLCA (latent-class), glmnet (elastic net), flexmix (finite mixtures), and the tidyverse.
• Deterministic RNG. set.seed() reproduces R's exact stream across the bridge — verified byte-identical to native R.
• Plots as bytes. r.plot(code, opts) renders through headless cairo (png/svg) or pdf and returns the image bytes to Lua; opts takes width, height, dpi, and format.
• Your files. A dedicated /data mount (r:data) shared between Lua (fs.get) and R (read.csv("/data/...")).
• Injection-safe args. Both binding forms serialize Lua values as R data literals: a hostile string stays a length-1 string, never code, and named bindings only accept plain R identifiers as variable names.

Documentation

The per-module wiki covers Installation, Usage, Architecture, Performance, Limitations, and License: https://hub.wippy.ai/wippy-langs/r/wiki/README.md.

License

GPL-3.0. R is distributed under GPL-2 | GPL-3, and this statically-combined module is a derivative work, so it ships under the GPL. See the License wiki page for the full third-party attribution.