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.
If the URL is public, it would be neat to see if you want to share it.
Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case.
(Disclosure: I work on https://quarto.org, for the same company that the author of WebR works on) Thanks for sharing that PDF link. It's so good! Would you be willing to write a bit about how you produced that PDF? It's a great example of what places like CIDR should be encouraging in terms of academic publications.
This is great! Thanks for sharing!
I love this, thanks for sharing! Linking to interactive versions of figures is such a great idea and use of WASM.
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.
Use case: teaching classes.
On HN, it seems trivial to install software, but for most people it is not.
Also, tablet and Chromebook users.
> Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.
The site is running completely locally. You can disable your network in devtools and it will continue to work.
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.
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.
That entire library/dataset is less than 5Mb compressed, which is barely larger than the size of modern commercial websites. An entire bible in uncompressed plaintext is only about 4Mb (compressed about 1Mb). Computers can really handle tons of data really fast; we've just become too accustomed to inefficiencies everywhere.
Yeah modern computers are stupid fast. Like 1000x faster than stuff in the 90s, but we squander all that computing power on poorly built software.
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.
Yes, it makes it possible to run Shiny without a Shiny server. There are a few limitations but it works well.
there should be another "browser" with better observability features. wasm is turning browsers into a hypervisor for virtual machines that run containers for a variety of languages now, including R.
great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.
Cool! Emscripten-forge also recently got a R distribution that runs natively on the browser: https://blog.jupyter.org/r-in-the-browser-announcing-our-web...
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.
If the URL is public, it would be neat to see if you want to share it.
Sure! https://cloudspecs.fyi/ (feedback welcome!)
Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case.
https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...
(Disclosure: I work on https://quarto.org, for the same company that the author of WebR works on) Thanks for sharing that PDF link. It's so good! Would you be willing to write a bit about how you produced that PDF? It's a great example of what places like CIDR should be encouraging in terms of academic publications.
This is great! Thanks for sharing!
I love this, thanks for sharing! Linking to interactive versions of figures is such a great idea and use of WASM.
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.
Use case: teaching classes.
On HN, it seems trivial to install software, but for most people it is not.
Also, tablet and Chromebook users.
> Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.
The site is running completely locally. You can disable your network in devtools and it will continue to work.
> I don't know who did this
I believe it's George Stagg https://github.com/georgestagg
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.
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.
That entire library/dataset is less than 5Mb compressed, which is barely larger than the size of modern commercial websites. An entire bible in uncompressed plaintext is only about 4Mb (compressed about 1Mb). Computers can really handle tons of data really fast; we've just become too accustomed to inefficiencies everywhere.
Yeah modern computers are stupid fast. Like 1000x faster than stuff in the 90s, but we squander all that computing power on poorly built software.
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.
You can, yes:
https://shinylive.io/r/examples/
Yes, it makes it possible to run Shiny without a Shiny server. There are a few limitations but it works well.
there should be another "browser" with better observability features. wasm is turning browsers into a hypervisor for virtual machines that run containers for a variety of languages now, including R.
great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.