Jony,

I'm currently writing up the paper for something with a similar result but
very different implementation. The RBrowserPlugin package/browser plugin
(joint with my advisor Duncan Temple Lang) embeds R within the web browser
as an NPAPI plugin.

This approach allows full bi-directional communication between R and the
javascript engine (including direct function calling and references to
native objects in both directions) using a user's existing local R
installation (including packages).

Devel source at https://github.com/gmbecker/RFirefox, release, (hopefully)
officially cross-platform version to coincide with the paper going off for
review.

I had toyed with the idea of the emscripten approach, but I think putting R
in the browser once is enough for me at the moment so I will happily keep
an eye on your project instead of attacking that myself :).

As for your actual question I can't really say, other than that I suspect
you will not be able to dispense with base and methods, but that I would
conjecture that stats is "optional".

~G


On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Jony Hudson <jony.hudson@imperial.ac.uk>wrote:

> Hi,
>
>  I'm trying to cross-compile R to javascript so that it can run in a
> web-browser. Take as long as you need to stop laughing. So, as I was saying
> - I want to try and get a build of R running in the browser. [If you're not
> familiar with it already, you might enjoy looking at emscripten.org. It's
> a remarkably capable tool for translating LLVM bitcode to javascript. Check
> out some of the demos!]
>
> I'm trying to start out with the most minimal build of R possible. I can
> turn off various options in the configure script, but I'm wondering about
> the bundled R packages (base, stats etc). I'm guessing that the native code
> portions of these packages are dynamically loaded at runtime, which will
> probably need patching. To start off, I'd like to not build these packages
> if possible.
>
> So, is there a way to configure which packages in the library get built or
> is it just a case of editing the makefile? And is there a minimal set of
> them that would still allow R to run (not be useful - that can come later -
> just run)?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide :-)
>
>
> Jony
>
> --
> Centre for Cold Matter, The Blackett Laboratory,
> Imperial College London, London SW7 2BW
> T: +44 (0)207 5947741
> http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/jony.hudson
> http://www.imperial.ac.uk/ccm/research/edm
> http://www.monkeycruncher.org
> http://j-star.org/
> --
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>



-- 
Gabriel Becker
Graduate Student
Statistics Department
University of California, Davis

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

