> A %PRODUCTNAME% next generation editor/ide is released
> Look inside
> VS Code
Formerly RStudio
> 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.
So the main news is that they're giving up on develping an independent IDE and turning into another VS code fork. The loss of biodiversity and reliance on a no-so-reliable steward is mildly concerning.
OTOH, posit funds a lot of development of important packages in the tidyverse and does a lot of community work etc.
So if maintaining RStudio is so much of a burden that it impedes the rest of their work, I don't think it's a bad idea to reduce the amount of work spent trying to compete with VSCode when that's an increasingly tough sell.
I'm not a fan of VSCode personally, but would probably be happy with a tmux setup with a console for R and some minimal output viewer, so people like me should be able to cobble something together that's a workable alternative to Posit.
They (reps? devs? I don't remember) have recently mentioned that they won't give up on RStudio, that it will stay separate from Positron. I really hope that stays true.
I'm not sure. wording like this:
> We anticipate many RStudio users will be curious about Positron.
Heavily implies it as a seperate thing that will continue to be maintained. They haven't said they're getting rid of support for Rstudio.
I think this is probably more that Posit have been trying to move more and more into the Python space, since that's where most data science is happenening. Rstudio has a great but is obviously very associated with R, so making a similarly intended project that is more explicit is supporting other languages isn't inherently a bad shout.
Unless this has recently changed, the support for LLM coding tools in RStudio is so bare bones that I would expect many users to switch to Positron just for that.
It will continue to be maintained, but if lots of R people move to Positron then RStudio's features will start to lag, and they'll eventually deprecate it.
I sent this to an R friend, and he was like, "yeah, it's been changed for a few years now". Is he missing something or has there been a major version or something?
May be mixing-up the company change with the IDE: Posit, the company, was named a few years ago, whereas Positron, the IDE, is new.
"Next generation IDE" comes out like every fuckin week. I already tried 3 new ones this month so I'm done. It looks nice tho
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.
It's worth considering what nextgen really would be, but probably VSCode and its forks will dominate for the time being. I recall Steve Yegge predicting that the next IDE to beat be the web browser, and this was around 2008 or so. It's not the reality, but took about 10-15 years for it to actually happen, even though there were earlier shots at it by like Atom.
check out the RAPIDS ecosystem from 2018 or so :)
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. . .
It was actually the case for a very long time - albeit a very successful one, so you never realized.
It has always (or at least for decades) been.
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...
If (That's a big if) they can give RStudio experience in VSCode environment, benefiting from the plugin ecosystem etc. why not?
RStudio is great when you are doing your own thing, but when it comes to more generic tools like Git, LLM, Autoformatting etc. it's a hard pass.
Who cares if it's VSCodium-based?
I feel like a lot of these can be packaged as an extension for vscode. I'd rather not have multiple different variations of the same ide, too much duplication.