In this talk I introduce webR, a port of R to WebAssembly using Emscripten. WebR brings a full R environment to the browser, enabling R code execution, numerical analysis, loading packages and more. No local or cloud-based R servers are required as all computation is performed within the browser. I give a brief overview of our build process for webR, describing the toolchain and some of the issues we encountered. A publicly available web-based R session is demonstrated, with package and plotting support.
Talk materials are available at https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio-conf/blob/master/2022/georgestagg/webr%20-%20George%20Stagg.pdf.
George Stagg is a Software Engineer with experience in research computing and mathematical digital learning software. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Newcastle University, researching the physics of quantum fluids through high performance computer simulation. Until recently George worked as part of the E-learning Unit at Newcastle University, developing software, providing research support and teaching mathematical computing with R, Python, LaTeX and more. George is now lead developer for the webR project, aiming to compile R and its packages for WebAssembly.
