Inlining Scala Breeze code in R using jvmr and sbt

[Update: The CRAN package “jvmr” has been replaced by a new package “rscala”. Rather than completely re-write this post, I’ve just created a github gist containing a new function, breezeInterpreter(), which works similarly to the function breezeInit() in this post. Usage information is given at the top of the gist.]

Introduction

In the previous post I showed how to call Scala code from R using sbt and jvmr. The approach described in that post is the one I would recommend for any non-trivial piece of Scala code – mixing up code from different languages in the same source code file is not a good strategy in general. That said, for very small snippets of code, it can sometimes be convenient to inline Scala code directly into an R source code file. The canonical example of this is a computationally intensive algorithm being prototyped in R which has a slow inner loop. If the inner loop can be recoded in a few lines of Scala, it would be nice to just inline this directly into the R code without having to create a separate Scala project. The CRAN package jvmr provides a very simple and straightforward way to do this. However, as discussed in the last post, most Scala code for statistical computing (even short and simple code) is likely to rely on Breeze for special functions, probability distributions, non-uniform random number generation, numerical linear algebra, etc. In this post we will see how to use sbt in order to make sure that the Breeze library and all of its dependencies are downloaded and cached, and to provide a correct classpath with which to initialise a jvmr scalaInterpreter session.

Setting up

Configuring your system to be able to inline Scala Breeze code is very easy. You just need to install Java, R and sbt. Then install the CRAN R package jvmr. At this point you have everything you need except for the R function breezeInit, given at the end of this post. I’ve deferred the function to the end of the post as it is a bit ugly, and the details of it are not important. All it does is get sbt to ensure that Breeze is correctly downloaded and cached and then starts a scalaInterpreter with Breeze on the classpath. With this function available, we can use it within an R session as the following R session illustrates:

> b=breezeInit()
> b['import breeze.stats.distributions._']
NULL
> b['Poisson(10).sample(20).toArray']
 [1] 13 14 13 10  7  6 15 14  5 10 14 11 15  8 11 12  6  7  5  7
> summary(b['Gamma(3,2).sample(10000).toArray'])
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
 0.2124  3.4630  5.3310  5.9910  7.8390 28.5200 
> 

So we see that Scala Breeze code can be inlined directly into an R session, and if we are careful about return types, have the results of Scala expressions automatically unpack back into convenient R data structures.

Summary

In this post I have shown how easy it is to inline Scala Breeze code into R using sbt in conjunction with the CRAN package jvmr. This has many potential applications, with the most obvious being the desire to recode slow inner loops from R to Scala. This should give performance quite comparable with alternatives such as Rcpp, with the advantage being that you get to write beautiful, elegant, functional Scala code instead of horrible, ugly, imperative C++ code! 😉

The breezeInit function

The actual breezeInit() function is given below. It is a little ugly, but very simple. It is obviously easy to customise for different libraries and library versions as required. All of the hard work is done by sbt which must be installed and on the default system path in order for this function to work.

breezeInit<-function()
{
  library(jvmr)
  sbtStr="name := \"tmp\"

version := \"0.1\"

libraryDependencies  ++= Seq(
            \"org.scalanlp\" %% \"breeze\" % \"0.10\",
            \"org.scalanlp\" %% \"breeze-natives\" % \"0.10\"
)

resolvers ++= Seq(
            \"Sonatype Snapshots\" at \"https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/\",
            \"Sonatype Releases\" at \"https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/releases/\"
)

scalaVersion := \"2.11.2\"

lazy val printClasspath = taskKey[Unit](\"Dump classpath\")

printClasspath := {
  (fullClasspath in Runtime value) foreach {
    e => print(e.data+\"!\")
  }
}
"
  tmps=file(file.path(tempdir(),"build.sbt"),"w")
  cat(sbtStr,file=tmps)
  close(tmps)
  owd=getwd()
  setwd(tempdir())
  cpstr=system2("sbt","printClasspath",stdout=TRUE)
  cpst=cpstr[length(cpstr)]
  cpsp=strsplit(cpst,"!")[[1]]
  cp=cpsp[2:(length(cpsp)-1)]
  si=scalaInterpreter(cp,use.jvmr.class.path=FALSE)
  setwd(owd)
  si
}