RProvider and C#

[njss]

Hello,

any chance to have RProvider working in C#?

thank you in advance...

[tpetricek]

C# does not support type providers, so there is no easy way of using R type provider directly from C#. I think the best option is to write your calculations using F# and R type provider in F#, compile them as a simple .NET library (that exposes the functionality you need) and then call the library from C#.

That said, there is a couple of things that could be done to support C#:

• There is RWrapperGenerator project (see here), where - AFAIK - the plan was to generate C# code (rather than build a type provider), so that could be recovered. I'm not sure anyone is looking into this at the moment, but we'd accept pull requests doing this.
• The type provider could be done as a generating type provider (that actually generates the types) rather than erasing type provider, which would let you add a small F# library referencing the type provider and then use the provided types from C#. I wouldn't do this by default, but it could be added as an option (again, I think we'd be happy to accept a PR adding this feature)