wch

r-source

R2015–2025

wch / r-source

r-source

Read-only mirror of R source code from https://svn.r-project.org/R/, updated hourly. See the build instructions on the wiki page.

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7Distinct people

7Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1.3KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Read-only mirror of R source code from https://svn.r-project.org/R/, updated hourly. See the build instructions on the wiki page.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-01-21 16:44:09 UTC to 2025-01-31 14:32:32 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

7 sources

dumah·Jan 31, 2025

In A better build system for OCaml

andrewf·Jul 2, 2021

https://github.com/wch/r-source/search?l=fortran&p=1 (https://github.com/wch/r-source says that's 23% of the source. It includes vendored libraries, like a 5MB .f of LAPACK code. I bet a lot of the C code in R was f2c'd at some point in the past)

In Fortran adds conditional expressions

ggrothendieck·Apr 24, 2020

Correct. One can write r"(c:\Windows\System32)" . Check out additional examples at the end of the help file: https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/src/library/base/...

In R 4.0

rgovostes·Apr 24, 2020

R is the worst programming language I've touched. I usually hear in response, "it may be quirky, but it has a lot of well-tested functions useful for data analysis." This confidence seems misplaced. Experienced developers using better languages with better tooling create bugs all the time. How likely is it that R packages, written by specialists (or grad students) whose main focus is often not programming but some other discipline, in a language full of "quirks," are going to be really reliable? One quirk that got me the last time I touched R was that functions and variables live in different namespaces, so you could assign 4 to foo and then call it. Fun fact, a lot of the R source code is machine translated from Fortran to C, but it has been cleaned up a lot. https://github.com/wch/r-source/search?p=1&q=f2c&unscoped_q=...

In R 4.0

thebelal·Nov 3, 2017

While it is true that S was originally a macro layer around FORTRAN code R has always been primarily written in C. Very little of R core is in FORTRAN, and essentially none of it is C++. The language statistics show a good deal of FORTRAN (%24.5) [0], however that is largely skewed by the included LAPACK code [1], which accounts for 221,921 / 259,773 lines of FORTRAN in R. [0]: https://github.com/wch/r-source [1]: https://github.com/wch/r-source/tree/trunk/src/modules/lapac...

In Renjin: a JVM-based interpreter for the R language

Ardren·Feb 2, 2016

Code reference: https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/b156e3a711967f58131e23c... Personally It seems a bit of stretch to call that "exclusionary as all hell".

In Why I'm leaving the R community

nkurz·Jan 21, 2015

This is probably a hard post to evaluate from the outside: is he right, or just overly sensitive? Earlier I would have been skeptical, but I've recently started on a project in R, and based on my experience so far I think he's mostly right: there are some real problems with R development. But I'd put less emphasis on individual "bad apples", and more on a culture that is dealing poorly with the approach of "development in the open". I think this recent exchange on the list illustrates nicely: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/PATCH-Makefile-add-support-for... The R source repository is in Subversion. A new contributor offers a very small patch to allow source downloaded from a git mirror to compile correctly. The response (not from Ripley) is "I think we are unlikely to accept this change. Nobody in R Core uses git this way, so it would

Read the rest

never be tested, and would likely soon fail." A reasonable position in some cases, but seems odd for a two line patch a Makefile that opens development to new contributors. Even stranger, it turns out that the patch is mostly working around a commit from several years ago (by Ripley) to explicitly prevent compilation from git: https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/4f13e5325dfbcb9fc8f55... Even stranger, this commit is commented "trap HK Leung misuse", where Han-Tak Leung is an earlier mailing list participant who had problems compiling as a result of using the "git-svn" compatibility layer. The thread discussing that earlier issue concluded (not Ripley): "The generic point is that you are given access to a working tool that is internal to the core R developers. We are not putting restrictions on what you do with that access, but if you want to play the game by other rules than we do, you need to take the consequences. If things don't work and you start complaining about them being "broken", steps may be taken to make it clearer who broke them." Considering the source repository and ability to submit patches as "access to a working tool that is internal to the core R developers" strikes me as a short-sighted approach. Spiking your source to refuse to compile if not checked out directly from svn seems like a bad strategy. Explaining the purpose as to "trap misuse" by an individual might be pathological. It makes me pessimistic about R's future.

In Don't use the mailing lists