The RStudio IDE is partly written in the C++ programming language and uses the Qt framework for its graphical user interface. The bigger percentage of the code is written in Java. JavaScript is also amongst the languages used. Work on the RStudio IDE started around December 2010, and the first public beta version was officially announced in February 2011. Version 1.0 was released on 1 November 2016. Version 1.1 was released on 9 October 2017. In April 2018, RStudio PBC announced that it will provide operational and infrastructure support to Ursa Labs in support of the Labs focus on building a new data science runtime powered by Apache Arrow. In April 2019, RStudio PBC released a new product, the RStudio Job Launcher. The Job Launcher is an adjunct to RStudio Server. The launcher provides the ability to start processes within various batch processing systems and container orchestration platforms. This function is only available in RStudio Server Pro.
Packages
In addition to the RStudio IDE, RStudio PBC and its employees develop, maintain, and promote a number of R packages. These include:
Tidyverse – R packages for data science, including ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, and purrr
flexdashboard - publish a group of related data visualizations as a dashboard
TensorFlow - open-source software library for Machine Intelligence. The R interface to TensorFlow lets you work productively using the high-level Keras and Estimator APIs and the core TensorFlow API
Tidymodels - install and load tidyverse packages related to modeling and analysis
Sparklyr - provides bindings to Spark’s distributed machine learning library. Together with sparklyr’s dplyr interface, you can easily create and tune machine learning workflows on Spark, orchestrated entirely within R
Stringr - consistent, simple and easy-to-use set of wrappers around the 'stringi' package
Reticulate - provides a comprehensive set of tools for interoperability between Python and R.
Plumber - enables you to convert your existing R code into web APIs by merely adding a couple of special comments.
knitr – Dynamic reports combining R, TeX, Markdown & HTML
packrat – Package dependency tool
devtools – Package development tool
sf – supports for simple features, a standardized way to encode spatial vector data. Binds to 'GDAL' for reading and writing data, to 'GEOS' for geometrical operations, and to 'PROJ' for projection conversions and datum transformations.
Addins
The RStudio IDE provides a mechanism for executing R functions interactively from within the IDE through the Addins menu. This enables packages to include Graphical User Interfaces for increased accessibility. Popular packages that use this feature include:
colourpicker – a graphical tool to pick colours for plots
datasets.load – a graphical tool to search and load datasets
googleAuthR – Authenticate with Google APIs
Development
The RStudio IDE is developed by RStudio, PBC, a commercial enterprise founded by JJ Allaire, creator of the programming languageColdFusion. RStudio, PBC has no formal connection to the R Foundation, a not-for-profit organization located in Vienna, Austria, which is responsible for overseeing development of the R environment for statistical computing.
