Summary
I'm looking for an IPC/RPC protocol which:
- Has libraries in both R and Python 2.7 which work on Windows
- Allows me to pass data and make calls between the two languages
- Does not embed one language inside the other (I want to use Python and R in my favourite IDEs, not embedding bits of R expression strings in Python code, vice/versa)
- Supports circular references
- Supports millisecond time data
- Fast and efficient when I need to pass large amounts of data
I have seen this similar question, but unlike the OP for that question, I do not want to use R in a pythonic way. I want to use R in an R way in my RStudio IDE. And I want to use Python in a Pythonic way in a PyCharm IDE. I just want to occasionally pass data or make calls between the two languages, not to blend the languages into one.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Background
I use both Python and R interactively (by typing into the console of my favourite IDE: PyCharm and RStudio respectively). I often need to pass data and call functions between the two languages ad-hoc when doing exploratory data analysis. For instance, I may start with processing data in Python, but later stumble across a great machine learning library in R that I want to try out, vice/versa.
I've looked at Python libraries PypeR and rpy2 but both embed R within Python, so I lose the ability to use R interactively within RStudio. I have also looked at RPython, but I use Windows and it does not work with Windows.
Additionally, I've looked at XML-RPC but some of my data has objects which contain circular references (e.g. a tree structure where child nodes have references to their parent). Problem is, Python's xmlrpclib does not support circular references, nor timestamps to millisecond precision which my data also contains.
