This is an R package providing mechanisms to run with external programs such as Julia, Shell, and Python, etc. The basic idea is to open a background process, pipe the source code into the process, evaluate it, and obtain the printed results.

This package is not on CRAN and there is no plan to release it to CRAN in the near future. You have to install it from Github using devtools:

devtools::install_github('yihui/runr')

At the moment, there are only a few very simple engines:

• a Julia engine (using TCP sockets; an example)
• a bash engine (using TCP sockets; an example)
• a python engine(using TCP sockets; an example)
• a ruby engine(using TCP socketss; an example)

Contributions welcome!

This package was originally designed for the language engines in knitr, but it might be useful for more general cases.