V8

Embedded JavaScript Engine for R

An R interface to Google's open source JavaScript engine. This package can now be compiled either with V8 version 6 (LTS) from nodejs or with the legacy 3.14/3.15 version of V8.

Documentation

About the R package:

• Vignette: Introduction to V8 for R
• Vignette: Using NPM packages in V8 with browserify

Hello World

# Create a new context
library(V8)
ctx <- v8()

# Evaluate some code
ctx$eval("var foo = 123")
ctx$eval("var bar = 456")
ctx$eval("foo+bar")

# Assign / get objects
ctx$assign("foo", JS("function(x){return x*x}"))
ctx$assign("bar", JS("foo(9)"))
ctx$get("bar")

Call functions from JavaScript libraries

ctx <- V8::v8()
ctx$source("https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/coffee-script/1.4.0/coffee-script.min.js")
jscode <- ctx$call("CoffeeScript.compile", "square = (x) -> x * x", list(bare = TRUE))
ctx$eval(jscode)
ctx$call("square", 9)

Installation

Binary packages for OS-X or Windows can be installed directly from CRAN:

install.packages("V8")

Installation from source on Linux requires libv8. On Ubuntu / Debian you need to install libv8-dev. On Debian 10 / Ubuntu 19.04 and up, libv8-dev is actually provided by libnode, but the installation remains the same:

# Debian and Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install -y libv8-dev

On Fedora we need v8-devel:

sudo yum install v8-devel

On CentOS / RHEL we install v8-devel via EPEL:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install v8-devel

On OS-X use v8 from Homebrew:

brew install v8

On other systems you might need to install libv8 from source.