RStudio-The Daily Ledger

RStudio is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It is available in two formats: RStudio Desktop is a regular desktop application while RStudio Server runs on a remote server and allows accessing RStudio using a web browser. The RStudio IDE is a product of Posit PBC (formerly RStudio PBC, formerly RStudio Inc.).

Licensing model

The RStudio integrated development environment (IDE) is available with the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. The AGPL v3 is an open source license that guarantees the freedom to share the code.

RStudio

RStudio Desktop and RStudio Server are both available in free and fee-based (commercial) editions. OS support depends on the format/edition of the IDE. Prepackaged distributions of RStudio Desktop are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. RStudio Server and Server Pro run on Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, CentOS, openSUSE and SLES.

RStudio

Overview and history

The RStudio IDE is partly written in the C++ programming language and uses the Qt framework for its graphical user interface. The bigger percentage of the code is written in Java. JavaScript is also used.

RStudio

Work on the RStudio IDE started around December 2010, and the first public beta version (v0.92) was officially announced in February 2011. Version 1.0 was released on 1 November 2016. Version 1.1 was released on 9 October 2017.

Addins

The RStudio IDE provides a mechanism for executing R functions interactively from within the IDE through the Addins menu. This enables packages to include Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for increased accessibility. Popular R packages that use this feature include:

bookdown – a knitr extension to create books

colourpicker – a graphical tool to pick colours for plots

datasets.load – a graphical tool to search and load datasets

googleAuthR – Authenticate with Google APIs

Development

The RStudio IDE is developed by Posit, PBC, a public-benefit corporation founded by J. J. Allaire, creator of the programming language ColdFusion. Posit has no formal connection to the R Foundation, a not-for-profit organization located in Vienna, Austria, which is responsible for overseeing development of the R environment for statistical computing. Posit was formerly known as RStudio Inc. In July 2022, it announced that it changed its name to Posit, to signify its broadening exploration towards other programming languages such as Python.