The goal of polyglotr is just to show how you can use three different languages through WebAssembly in an R package using wasmr. All of this is very experimental.

library(polyglotr)

The package exposes an inefficient, recursive fibonacci algorithm written in languages that can compile to WebAssembly.

fib_r <- function(n) {
  if (n < 2) return(n)
  Recall(n - 1) + Recall(n - 2)
}

Each of the following functions calls a bundled binary wasm file in the inst directory that was compiled from the respective language. The binary file is distributed with the package, but not necessarily the source files. The user does not need to compile anything (apart from the wasmr package).

fib_c(20)
#> [1] 6765
fib_rust(20)
#> [1] 6765
fib_assemblyscript(20)
#> [1] 6765
fib_go(20)
#> [1] 6765
fib_r(20)
#> [1] 6765

The benchmark is not meant to compare different compilers, just to give a rough feeling about timing. In fact most of the compilers will probably emit very similiar wasm code. Also each function call reads the wasm file from disk and instantiates it.

I also used tinygo to compile the go code which adds some interface code resulting in a 4kb file. There might be flags to further optimize the generated code.

bench::mark(
  fib_c(20),
  fib_rust(20),
  fib_assemblyscript(20),
  fib_go(20),
  fib_r(20)
)
#> # A tibble: 5 x 6
#>   expression                  min   median `itr/sec` mem_alloc `gc/sec`
#>   <bch:expr>             <bch:tm> <bch:tm>     <dbl> <bch:byt>    <dbl>
#> 1 fib_c(20)                1.21ms   1.39ms     439.     12.2KB     2.07
#> 2 fib_rust(20)             1.19ms   1.32ms     618.     12.1KB     2.03
#> 3 fib_assemblyscript(20)   1.17ms   1.27ms     661.     11.4KB     4.29
#> 4 fib_go(20)               2.75ms   2.98ms     280.     15.7KB     2.06
#> 5 fib_r(20)               14.17ms  14.79ms      60.4        0B    33.5