R Bytecode Book

Preface

This is a book about the bytecode which drives the virtual machine at the heart of R code execution.

R is a tricky beast.

It never ceases to amaze and anger me with its funky syntax, weird errors, expressive vector syntax, meta-programming, functional leanings and all manner of pearls and warts.

I (weirdly) enjoy the process of understanding R. I like breaking it to see how it works, and doing cool (but useless) things with it - purely for the fun in doing so.

This book represents my current (and still evolving) understanding of bytecode, and I hope to use this understanding to break R in new and exciting ways.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the great work from the R Core Team for R itself and the {compiler} package.