Question about translating R code to Julia

mpampuch
Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:25:14 +0000
New to Julia

I am working on improving a Bioconductor package for analyzing high-throughput genetic assays by porting it from R to Julia. Currently it works well on statistical benchmarks, but one of the main limitations is speed, which I suspect has limited its adoption.

I’m also looking for advice on:

Best practices for translating statistical packages from R to Julia.

Any gotchas or common pitfalls when porting code like this.

Another question I have is, since this R package is currently part of the BioConductor ecosystem, I don’t really want to purely convert it to Julia. The way I see it, to get the widest adoption by people the bioinformaticians who would use it, I’d want to keep it in the BioConductor ecosystem. The way I would see this working is that:

A researcher has a workflow in R → This results in some R data structure that can pass as input to a function in the package → The user calls an R function from the package → Some interface package like JuliaCall would convert the R data structure behind the scenes into a Julia data structure → The function would then execute behind the scenes in Julia → The output would get converted into R → The researcher continues their work in R.

The part I’m unsure of if it would work is this: The function would then execute behind the scenes in Julia. Can a Julia package, alongside all of it’s dependencies, be bundled easily and distributed in an R or BioConductor package? Can anyone give me tips on how to accomplish this?

4 posts - 4 participants