RStudio is an

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...

for R, a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

for statistical computing and graphics. It is available in two formats: RStudio Desktop is a regular

desktop application A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

while RStudio Server runs on a remote server and allows accessing RStudio using a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

Licensing model

The RStudio

(IDE) is available with the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. The AGPL v3 is an open source license that guarantees the freedom to share the code. RStudio Desktop and RStudio Server are both available in free and fee-based (commercial) editions. OS support depends on the format/edition of the IDE. Prepackaged distributions of RStudio Desktop are available for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

, and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

. RStudio Server and Server Pro run on Debian,

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta rele ...

, CentOS,

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, s ...

and SLES.

Overview and History

The RStudio IDE is partly written in the

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

programming language and uses the Qt framework for its

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...

. The bigger percentage of the code is written in Java. JavaScript is also used. Work on the RStudio IDE started around December 2010, and the first public

beta version A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

(v0.92) 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 (at the time RStudio, Inc.) 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 (at the time RStudio, Inc.) 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 (e.g. Slurm) and container orchestration platforms (e.g. Kubernetes). This function is only available in RStudio Server Pro (fee-based application).

Packages

In addition to the RStudio IDE, RStudio PBC and its employees develop, maintain, and promote a number of R packages. These include: List-of-r-packages

Tidyverse The tidyverse is a collection of open source packages for the R programming language introduced by Hadley Wickham and his team that "share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures" of tidy data. Characteristic features of t ...

– R packages for data science, including

ggplot2 ggplot2 is an open-source data visualization package for the statistical programming language R. Created by Hadley Wickham in 2005, ggplot2 is an implementation of Leland Wilkinson's ''Grammar of Graphics''—a general scheme for data visu ...

, dplyr, tidyr, and purrr * Shiny – an interactive web technology * RMarkdown –

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown i ...

documents make it easy for users to mix text with code of different languages, most commonly R. However, the platform supports mixing R with

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

, shell scripts, SQL, Stan,

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

, CSS,

Julia Julia is usually a feminine given name. It is a Latinate feminine form of the name Julio and Julius. (For further details on etymology, see the Wiktionary entry "Julius".) The given name ''Julia'' had been in use throughout Late Antiquity (e.g ...

, C, Fortran, and other languages in the same RMarkdown document. *flexdashboard – publish a group of related data visualizations as a dashboard *

TensorFlow TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...

– 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 knitr is an engine for dynamic report generation with R. It is a package in the programming language R that enables integration of R code into LaTeX, LyX, HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc, and reStructuredText documents. The purpose of knitr is to allow ...

– dynamic reports combining R, TeX, Markdown & HTML * packrat – package dependency tool * devtools – package development tool as well as helps to install R-packages from

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

. * 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 The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

(GUIs) for increased accessibility. Popular packages that use this feature include: * bookdown – a

extension to create books * 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 Posit, PBC, a public-benefit corporation founded by J. J. Allaire, creator of the programming language ColdFusion. Posit has no formal connection to the R Foundation, a not-for-profit organization located in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

, which is responsible for overseeing development of the R environment for statistical computing. Posit was formerly known as RStudio Inc. In July 2022, it announced that it changed its name to Posit, to signify its broadening exploration towards other programming languages such as

References

External links

* {{Integrated development environments Free R (programming language) software R (programming language) Science software for Linux Software using the GNU AGPL license