You certainly don't have to use it. One of the goals we had when we created Renjin was to keep it pure Java. Even the packages with native code are transpiled t

You certainly don't have to use it. One of the goals we had when we created Renjin was to keep it pure Java. Even the packages with native code are transpiled to pure Java bytecode so you can use an R interpreter in a JVM without interfacing to native code (e.g. using JNI) and this allows you to use the interpreter on an instance with one of the many Platform-as-a-Service providers like we do with Google App Engine. Oh, GNU R is also garbage collected of course and compared to the JVM's garbage collector it is pretty primitive. This is an area where TIBCO have also improved their own R interpreter called TERR [1]. [1] http://www.edii.uclm.es/~useR-2013/slides/65.pdf http://www.edii.uclm.es/~useR-2013/slides/65.pdf