> RStudio (now Posit) was founded in 2009 with the vision of creating high quality open-source software for data scientists. We’ve grown exponentially over time but our culture remains unchanged. We invest heavily in open-source development, education, and the community with the goal of serving knowledge creators 100 years from now.
> We want Posit to serve a meaningful public purpose and we run the company for the benefit of our customers, employees, and the community at large. That’s why we’re designated as a Public Benefit Corporation. As a Certified B Corp, we must meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. Our directors and officers have a fiduciary responsibility to address social, economic, and environmental needs while still overseeing our business goals.
Wow so RStudio has switched from being a "real" desktop app to another webview-based thing? Bummer. I hadn't used RStudio for some time but now I probably will continue to not do so. . .
Oof. That's a damn shame. I think languages and use-cases like this are the perfect place for purpose built IDE development. If even these guys are turning into a VS Code downstream that's just sad.
Coincidentally I was thinking of giving R another go, but honestly now... I'm good...
I know "next-generation" is just SEO slop, but I'm going to hyper fixate on this for a moment (so feel free to ignore if you're actually interested in Positron).
I think the future of data science will likely be something else, with the advent of WebGPU[1] (which isn't just a web technology) and the current quality/availability of GPUs in end user devices, and a lot of data computation clearly standing to benefit from this.
The real next generation of data science tools will likely involve tools that are GPU first and try to keep as much work in the GPU as possible. I definitely think we'll see some new languages eventually emerge to abstract much of the overhead of batching work but also forces people to explicitly consider when they write code that simply won't run on the GPU, like sequential operations that are nonlinear, nonassociative/noncommutative (like highly sequential operations like processing an ordered block of text).
I think WebGPU is going to make this a lot easier.
That said I'd imagine for larger compute workloads people are going to continue to stick with large CUDA clusters as they have more functionality and handle a larger variety of workloads. But on end user devices there's an opportunity to create tools that allow data scientists to more trivially do this kind of work when they compute their models, process their datasets.
[1] Other compute APIs existed in the past, but WebGPU might be one of the most successful attempt to provide a portable (and more accessible) way to write general GPU compute code. I've seen people say WebGPU is hard, but having given it ago (without libraries) I don't think this is all that true, compared to OpenGL there are no longer specialised APIs to load data into uniforms everything is just a buffer. I wonder if this has more to do with non JS bindings for use outside the browser/node or the fact you're forced to consider memory layout of anything your loading into the GPU from the start (something that can be abstracted and generalised), just in my experience after my first attempt at writing a compute shader it's fairly simple IMO. Like stuff that always complicated in rendering like text is still complicated, but at least its not a state based API like web/opengl.
I hope positron works out fine, last time I checked it was not yet usable.
Replacing Rstudio with something more reliable would be nice, because of some major design flaws Rstudio has.
A lot of the UI stuff runs also in R, so when the R kernel dies, quite often I cannot save unsaved files. So I need to copy the file content to a different text editor when that happens.
I also don't understand why the LLM-Chat window is running inside the R console, and then blocks running R code. That makes it completely unusable.
I was initially interested in Positron, until checking out the license:
"Positron is licensed under the Elastic License 2.0, a source-available license. This license makes Positron available for free to everyone to use, build on, and extend for personal, academic, and commercial use. Its primary restriction is that you can’t host Positron as a service to third parties without Posit’s agreement. This restriction is necessary for us to build a sustainable business around Positron while also offering it free of charge to the community."
"You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key."
This is not a recommendation on whether anyone should use Positron. I think it's fair that people know it's just another piece of proprietary software with a license key. Posit is a public benefit corporation, which sounds nice, but you're still subject to the same games any other for-profit private company plays with its customers.
(I use Posit Cloud in my teaching, so my interactions with their products are as a customer, but I use RStudio, which is open source.)
Was looking forward to trying this, but they haven't got inline chunks for rmarkdown to work yet. This I use religiously. Hopefully they'll be able to ship it eventually, but based on the GitHub issue about it it will be a while.
I understand that extensions have some limits in VS Code, but is it clear this needs to be a fork vs. an extension? An extension would allow it to work in Google Antigravity too.
11 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] thread> RStudio (now Posit) was founded in 2009 with the vision of creating high quality open-source software for data scientists. We’ve grown exponentially over time but our culture remains unchanged. We invest heavily in open-source development, education, and the community with the goal of serving knowledge creators 100 years from now.
> We want Posit to serve a meaningful public purpose and we run the company for the benefit of our customers, employees, and the community at large. That’s why we’re designated as a Public Benefit Corporation. As a Certified B Corp, we must meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. Our directors and officers have a fiduciary responsibility to address social, economic, and environmental needs while still overseeing our business goals.
Coincidentally I was thinking of giving R another go, but honestly now... I'm good...
> Look inside
> VS Code
I think the future of data science will likely be something else, with the advent of WebGPU[1] (which isn't just a web technology) and the current quality/availability of GPUs in end user devices, and a lot of data computation clearly standing to benefit from this.
The real next generation of data science tools will likely involve tools that are GPU first and try to keep as much work in the GPU as possible. I definitely think we'll see some new languages eventually emerge to abstract much of the overhead of batching work but also forces people to explicitly consider when they write code that simply won't run on the GPU, like sequential operations that are nonlinear, nonassociative/noncommutative (like highly sequential operations like processing an ordered block of text).
I think WebGPU is going to make this a lot easier.
That said I'd imagine for larger compute workloads people are going to continue to stick with large CUDA clusters as they have more functionality and handle a larger variety of workloads. But on end user devices there's an opportunity to create tools that allow data scientists to more trivially do this kind of work when they compute their models, process their datasets.
[1] Other compute APIs existed in the past, but WebGPU might be one of the most successful attempt to provide a portable (and more accessible) way to write general GPU compute code. I've seen people say WebGPU is hard, but having given it ago (without libraries) I don't think this is all that true, compared to OpenGL there are no longer specialised APIs to load data into uniforms everything is just a buffer. I wonder if this has more to do with non JS bindings for use outside the browser/node or the fact you're forced to consider memory layout of anything your loading into the GPU from the start (something that can be abstracted and generalised), just in my experience after my first attempt at writing a compute shader it's fairly simple IMO. Like stuff that always complicated in rendering like text is still complicated, but at least its not a state based API like web/opengl.
Replacing Rstudio with something more reliable would be nice, because of some major design flaws Rstudio has. A lot of the UI stuff runs also in R, so when the R kernel dies, quite often I cannot save unsaved files. So I need to copy the file content to a different text editor when that happens. I also don't understand why the LLM-Chat window is running inside the R console, and then blocks running R code. That makes it completely unusable.
Or at least a positive version of it...
"Positron is licensed under the Elastic License 2.0, a source-available license. This license makes Positron available for free to everyone to use, build on, and extend for personal, academic, and commercial use. Its primary restriction is that you can’t host Positron as a service to third parties without Posit’s agreement. This restriction is necessary for us to build a sustainable business around Positron while also offering it free of charge to the community."
"You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key."
This is not a recommendation on whether anyone should use Positron. I think it's fair that people know it's just another piece of proprietary software with a license key. Posit is a public benefit corporation, which sounds nice, but you're still subject to the same games any other for-profit private company plays with its customers.
(I use Posit Cloud in my teaching, so my interactions with their products are as a customer, but I use RStudio, which is open source.)