FastR - Optimizing and Enhancing R Language Implementation

The current reference implementation of the R language, namely GNU R, is very mature and extremely popular. Nevertheless, alternative implementations are under development with the goal of improving and enhancing the current state-of-the-art. FastR is one such implementation created by Oracle Labs in collaboration with academic partners. FastR aims to deliver a fully compatible R language implementation compiling R programs to efficient native code, but which at the same time constitutes an experimentation platform for enhancing some of the existing R capabilities, for example with respect to parallel execution. FastR is built upon an infrastructure consisting of an optimizing compiler called Graal and of Truffle framework which simplifies creation of new language runtimes that can then interface with Graal. The infrastructure is specifically designed to support creation of dynamic languages, such as R, by taking advantage of runtime execution profiling and aggressive optimistic optimizations during the compilation process. In this talk I will describe how the Graal/Truffle infrastructure enables some of the optimizations in FastR's runtime and demonstrate how effective these optimizations are in practice based on an experimental performance evaluation. I will also present our work on enhancing R, in particular with respect to parallel computation capabilities by supplanting GNU R’s process-based model (as defined in the parallel or snowfall packages) with an API-compatible thread-based model where communication between different parts of parallel computation occurs over shared-memory channels.