SHF: PROJECT DARWIN_ Towards Principled Language Evolution

R是一个庞大的语言生态系统，由统计和图形功能、编程语言以及开源编程环境中的所有其他构件组成。R被学术界数以百万计的科学/工程程序员使用，并在商业和工业中大量使用。R正在达到极限，如果要跟上并推进科学的步伐，就需要进行重大革新。该提案建议对R语言的几个方面进行现代化改造，并集成新的基础设施元素。现代化工作将集中在语言实现的代码库、编译器和内存子系统上。这些新特性将围绕添加类型注释来提高R程序的正确性和性能，并协助分布式执行。PI与R核心开发人员有着良好的联系，并且有一条清晰的途径将版本发布到生产环境中。随着问题在计算上变得越来越复杂，以及使用快速增长的数据集，这些增强将帮助R支持科学的步伐。用R编程的科学计算将运行得更快，能够处理更大的分布式数据集，并且通过使语言现代化，实现将更容易维护。对于编程语言研究社区来说，重新实现一个像R这样的实时的、全面的语言将会很有趣，同时也为科学/工程编程提供了一个更可持续的基础设施。

R is a large language ecosystem consisting of statistical and graphical capabilities, a programming language, and all the other artifacts present in an open source programming environment. R is used by millions of scientific/engineering programmers in academia and is used heavily in business and industry. R is hitting limits and needs major renovations if it is to keep up with, and advance, the pace of science. This proposal proposes to modernize several aspects of the R language and to integrate new infrastructure elements. The modernization effort will focus on the code base of the language implementation, the compiler and the memory subsystem. The new features will center around the addition of type annotations to improve correctness and performance of R programs as well as to assist with distributed execution. The PI is well-connected to the R core developers, and there is a clear path to releasing versions into production. The enhancements will help R support the pace of science, as problems become more computationally complex and use rapidly growing data sets. Scientific computations programmed in R will run faster, be capable of processing much larger, distributed data sets, and the implementation will be easier to maintain by modernizing the language. The experience of reimplementing a live, full-scale language like R will be interesting to the programming language research community, as well as providing a more sustainable infrastructure for science/engineering programming.