Introduction to Julia for R Users

R is widely used for data analysis, but Julia offers high performance with a user-friendly syntax, making it an appealing alternative. This talk explores how R users can benefit from Julia, get started with it, and integrate it with R.

By Nicola Rennie in Conference

Many statisticians and data scientists use R to implement methodologies and analyse data. Though R is sufficient for many tasks, there may be some occasions where there is a need for another, perhaps faster, programming language. One option is Julia. Julia is a high-level, high-performance programming language, which can achieve speeds comparable to low-level languages like C while maintaining a user-friendly syntax. It has a growing ecosystem of data science and statistical programming capabilities, making it an increasingly attractive alternative to R. This talk will aim to address three questions:

How might an R user benefit from using Julia?
How can R users get started with Julia?
How can an R user combine R with Julia?