5 ms·

WebR – R in the Browser

117 points by creata 11mo ago

dash2 10mo ago
Impressively, this managed to download the large nycflights13 library very quickly, and run a regression on its multimillion-row data in just a second or two.
- em500 10mo ago
  That entire library/dataset is less than 5Mb compressed, which is barely larger than the size of modern commercial websites. An entire bible in uncompressed plaintext is only about 4Mb (compressed about 1Mb). Computers can really handle tons of data really fast; we've just become too accustomed to inefficiencies everywhere.
  - patmorgan23 10mo ago
    Yeah modern computers are stupid fast. Like 1000x faster than stuff in the 90s, but we squander all that computing power on poorly built software.
juujian 10mo ago
Would be interesting to see if we can run shiny entirely client side with this.
- georgestagg 10mo ago
  You can, yes: https://shinylive.io/r/examples/ https://shinylive.io/r/examples/
- ekianjo 10mo ago
  Yes, it makes it possible to run Shiny without a Shiny server. There are a few limitations but it works well.
stateofinquiry 10mo ago
Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done. However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine. So, I am a strange combination of impressed with this site and confounded trying to figure out why it exists. I'm probably missing something.
- fn-mote 10mo ago
  Use case: teaching classes. On HN, it seems trivial to install software, but for most people it is not. Also, tablet and Chromebook users.
  - levocardia 10mo ago
    Yes, the first 15-20 min of every programming presentation I ever went to was "getting it set up on your computer." Very wasteful!
- kevmo314 10mo ago
  > Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine. The site is running completely locally. You can disable your network in devtools and it will continue to work.
- ekianjo 10mo ago
  > I don't know who did this I believe it's George Stagg https://github.com/georgestagg https://github.com/georgestagg
- apwheele 10mo ago
  When you want to run stuff client side instead of your server is one question to determine. For R specifically, it is focused on stats/graphing. So if you wanted an app where someone could upload data and fit a complicated regression model, this would be a good use case. (There are probably javascript libraries for regression, but if willing to live with the bit of start up lag, worth it for anything mildly complicated -- factors in R for example would not like to worry about writing my own code in javascript to make the design matrix.) In the case where you run the server, the data has to travel to your server, your computer estimates the model, and it sends it back. WASM apps this all happens client side. It is a good use case for dynamic graphs/dashboards as well. If the data is small enough to entirely fit in memory, can basically have a local interactive session with the data and everything will be quite snappy (do not need to continually go back and forth with your server to query data).
maxi-k 10mo ago
This is an awesome project. We recently used it to build a statically hosted EC2 instance comparison website, using this for plotting (ggplot2) and DuckDB-Wasm for querying the instance data. Only the first page load is slow b/c of all the wasm and R packages, but it's fast for interactive querying and plotting and was really easy to create.
- carbocation 10mo ago
  If the URL is public, it would be neat to see if you want to share it.
  - maxi-k 10mo ago
    Sure! https://cloudspecs.fyi/ https://cloudspecs.fyi/ (feedback welcome!) Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case. https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/cloudspecs-final.pdf https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...
    - jansim 10mo ago
      I love this, thanks for sharing! Linking to interactive versions of figures is such a great idea and use of WASM.
      - maxi-k 10mo ago
        Thanks! We hope other papers will adopt the idea as well. I think most use either python+matplotlib or R+ggplot for figures, so WebR is a real win. Since it's only static files, you can also imagine "reproducibility archives" that you can just run in the browser (hopefully) years later w/o installing anything.
    - cscheid 10mo ago
      (Disclosure: I work on https://quarto.org https://quarto.org, for the same company that the author of WebR works on) Thanks for sharing that PDF link. It's so good! Would you be willing to write a bit about how you produced that PDF? It's a great example of what places like CIDR should be encouraging in terms of academic publications.
gavmor 10mo ago
Can R be meaningfully run against datasets small enough to fit in the browser?
- harvey9 10mo ago
  Yes. There are domains where the data is not web-scale.
kasperset 10mo ago
I use R a lot but I still prefer Javascript libraries for interactivity. Javascript libraries feels lot more smoother than something like webR. Having said that, it is impressive that R is able to transcend in the interactivity with just internet browser.
motohagiography 10mo ago
there should be another "browser" with better observability features. wasm is turning browsers into a hypervisor for virtual machines that run containers for a variety of languages now, including R. great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.
droelf 10mo ago
Cool! Emscripten-forge also recently got a R distribution that runs natively on the browser: https://blog.jupyter.org/r-in-the-browser-announcing-our-webassembly-distribution-9450e9539ed5?gi=81cf18b1ac6a https://blog.jupyter.org/r-in-the-browser-announcing-our-web...
tkschmidtme 10mo ago
WebR is awesome and I’m trying to use it more and more instead of in operating fixed figures (https://tkschmidt.me/posts/dagstuhl-problem/ https://tkschmidt.me/posts/dagstuhl-problem/). I would really recommend to stay with a fixed webR version (and use a CI/CD) process to check if newer versions are still compatible with your scripts.
laex 10mo ago
github: https://github.com/r-wasm/webr https://github.com/r-wasm/webr

117 points by creata 11mo ago

dash2 10mo ago

Impressively, this managed to download the large nycflights13 library very quickly, and run a regression on its multimillion-row data in just a second or two.

em500 10mo ago
That entire library/dataset is less than 5Mb compressed, which is barely larger than the size of modern commercial websites. An entire bible in uncompressed plaintext is only about 4Mb (compressed about 1Mb). Computers can really handle tons of data really fast; we've just become too accustomed to inefficiencies everywhere.
- patmorgan23 10mo ago
  Yeah modern computers are stupid fast. Like 1000x faster than stuff in the 90s, but we squander all that computing power on poorly built software.

juujian 10mo ago

Would be interesting to see if we can run shiny entirely client side with this.

georgestagg 10mo ago
You can, yes: https://shinylive.io/r/examples/ https://shinylive.io/r/examples/
ekianjo 10mo ago
Yes, it makes it possible to run Shiny without a Shiny server. There are a few limitations but it works well.

stateofinquiry 10mo ago

Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done. However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine. So, I am a strange combination of impressed with this site and confounded trying to figure out why it exists. I'm probably missing something.

fn-mote 10mo ago
Use case: teaching classes. On HN, it seems trivial to install software, but for most people it is not. Also, tablet and Chromebook users.
- levocardia 10mo ago
  Yes, the first 15-20 min of every programming presentation I ever went to was "getting it set up on your computer." Very wasteful!
kevmo314 10mo ago
> Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine. The site is running completely locally. You can disable your network in devtools and it will continue to work.
ekianjo 10mo ago
> I don't know who did this I believe it's George Stagg https://github.com/georgestagg https://github.com/georgestagg
apwheele 10mo ago
When you want to run stuff client side instead of your server is one question to determine. For R specifically, it is focused on stats/graphing. So if you wanted an app where someone could upload data and fit a complicated regression model, this would be a good use case. (There are probably javascript libraries for regression, but if willing to live with the bit of start up lag, worth it for anything mildly complicated -- factors in R for example would not like to worry about writing my own code in javascript to make the design matrix.) In the case where you run the server, the data has to travel to your server, your computer estimates the model, and it sends it back. WASM apps this all happens client side. It is a good use case for dynamic graphs/dashboards as well. If the data is small enough to entirely fit in memory, can basically have a local interactive session with the data and everything will be quite snappy (do not need to continually go back and forth with your server to query data).

maxi-k 10mo ago

This is an awesome project. We recently used it to build a statically hosted EC2 instance comparison website, using this for plotting (ggplot2) and DuckDB-Wasm for querying the instance data. Only the first page load is slow b/c of all the wasm and R packages, but it's fast for interactive querying and plotting and was really easy to create.

carbocation 10mo ago
If the URL is public, it would be neat to see if you want to share it.
- maxi-k 10mo ago
  Sure! https://cloudspecs.fyi/ https://cloudspecs.fyi/ (feedback welcome!) Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case. https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/cloudspecs-final.pdf https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...
  - jansim 10mo ago
    I love this, thanks for sharing! Linking to interactive versions of figures is such a great idea and use of WASM.
    - maxi-k 10mo ago
      Thanks! We hope other papers will adopt the idea as well. I think most use either python+matplotlib or R+ggplot for figures, so WebR is a real win. Since it's only static files, you can also imagine "reproducibility archives" that you can just run in the browser (hopefully) years later w/o installing anything.
  - cscheid 10mo ago
    (Disclosure: I work on https://quarto.org https://quarto.org, for the same company that the author of WebR works on) Thanks for sharing that PDF link. It's so good! Would you be willing to write a bit about how you produced that PDF? It's a great example of what places like CIDR should be encouraging in terms of academic publications.

gavmor 10mo ago

Can R be meaningfully run against datasets small enough to fit in the browser?

harvey9 10mo ago
Yes. There are domains where the data is not web-scale.

kasperset 10mo ago

I use R a lot but I still prefer Javascript libraries for interactivity. Javascript libraries feels lot more smoother than something like webR. Having said that, it is impressive that R is able to transcend in the interactivity with just internet browser.

motohagiography 10mo ago

there should be another "browser" with better observability features. wasm is turning browsers into a hypervisor for virtual machines that run containers for a variety of languages now, including R. great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.

droelf 10mo ago

Cool! Emscripten-forge also recently got a R distribution that runs natively on the browser: https://blog.jupyter.org/r-in-the-browser-announcing-our-webassembly-distribution-9450e9539ed5?gi=81cf18b1ac6a https://blog.jupyter.org/r-in-the-browser-announcing-our-web...

tkschmidtme 10mo ago

WebR is awesome and I’m trying to use it more and more instead of in operating fixed figures (https://tkschmidt.me/posts/dagstuhl-problem/ https://tkschmidt.me/posts/dagstuhl-problem/). I would really recommend to stay with a fixed webR version (and use a CI/CD) process to check if newer versions are still compatible with your scripts.

laex 10mo ago

github: https://github.com/r-wasm/webr https://github.com/r-wasm/webr