The R Programming Language Is Now Fast Enough to Run Games on Linux with Nara
You may (or may not) be familiar with the existence of the R programming language. This is one very approachable language used mainly in the data science field and by more traditional statisticians as well. We have been using it extensively on Boiling Steam for numerous articles up until now. There’s a good chance that most of the charts you come across on our pages were made with R. Or even videos.
Why are we talking about R today? Well, since the release of the new package called Nara (for NAtive RAster, not the ancient japanese city that you should definitely visit if you are in Japan), R is now capable of rendering graphics very fast. Don’t expect it to reach thousands of frames per second, but compared to libraries like ggplot2, used for charting, which take several seconds to generate vector graphics, Nara can easily produce graphics at above 30 fps. The author of the package has released two demos to showcase what it can actually do: a non-interactive version of Pacman, and a port of Another World on R.
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One of the strength of the R language is its extraordinary community support. This is language that has by far surpassed all the commercial alternatives like SPSS because of its extreme extensibility and the explosion of packages available to use with R. All of it being under FOSS licenses. This is why this is a big thing in itself: making something possible in R will without doubt lead to more developers around the world to experiment with these new capabilities.
Also today (same site): Thymesia Review: A Frustrating Almost-Borne