One of the reasons that I don’t often take advantage of the cool features in Revolution R is that I absolutely can’t stand their Visual Studio interface. Previously, if I wanted to run something in RevoR, I fired up the RGui.exe that comes buried in their distribution and used R’s built in script editor. My normal workflow is to use StatEt inside of Eclipse, so dealing with R’s meager editor was always painful. (Although less painful than the bloated VS-standalone alternative.)

Over the break, I ran across Luke Miller’s excellent post on getting Eclipse setup with StatEt the right way. I was able to follow his tutorial to get vanilla 64-bit R setup on a new installation of 64-bit Eclipse Helios. Once that was working, I changed two things to add a second shortcut for Revo R.

First, I followed his directions to install rJava in RevoR:
C:Usersnathanvan>cd C:RevolutionRevo-4.0RevoEnt64R-2.11.1bin C:RevolutionRevo-4.0RevoEnt64R-2.11.1bin>R.exe R version 2.11.1 (2010-05-31) Copyright (C) 2010 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing ISBN 3-900051-07-0 ... Type 'revo()' to visit www.revolutionanalytics.com for the latest Revolution R news, 'forum()' for the community forum, or 'readme()' for release notes. > install.packages("rJava") ... package 'rJava' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked The downloaded packages are in C:UsersnathanvanAppDataLocalTempRtmpG3tMzbdownloaded_packages

And then installed rj in RevoR, once again using his directions.
C:RevolutionRevo-4.0RevoEnt64R-2.11.1bin>R CMD INSTALL --no-test-load "C:UsersnathanvanDownloadsrj_0.5.2-1.tar.gz" ... * DONE (rj)

And finally setup Eclipse with a second Run Configuration which I named Revo-R-x64-2.11.1. Now I can run the 64bit version of RevoR without having to deal with the VisualStudio interface. If I get around to it, I’ll post some performance numbers. (The last time I used the VS interface, it was noticeably slower than calling RGui.exe directly.)