Statistical Programing Language R Adds 64-Bit Integer Support

The R programming language, which is used in particular for statistical data analysis and visualization, now supports 64-bit integers, a limitation that has so far hindered some uses of the language.

French developer Romain François is responsible for the new feature. Rather than building a new data type from scratch, he simply used the existing 32-bit integers and used two of them inside an S4 each representing one half of the bits needed for the larger int64.

However, this approach meant that he had to modify almost all of the arithmetic operations in R to take into account the new type.

"We’ve had to work around the lack of 64-bit integers in R for several years at Google. And after several discussions with Romain, we were very happy to be able to fund his development of this package to solve the problem not just for us, but for the broader open-source community as well," Google wrote, noting the development.