This is a test to see if it's possible to write logic in TypeScript, with nontrivial npm dependencies, with the intent of deploying the logic in an R package.
There's lots of cool functionality in JS libraries that would be great to access from R libraries. However, as R package authors, we don't want to require R users to install Node.js (or Deno) just to use our R package.
The V8 R package is a wrapper around a world-class JS engine, but it certainly doesn't provide the facilities of Node.js/Deno/browsers (no window object, no native TypeScript support, no module resolution/loading). So it's necessary to do some preprocessing to make our logic suitable for execution with V8.
V8 has a vignette for using npm dependencies, using browserify. This repo is an attempt to do something similar, with TypeScript, using rollup.
You do need Node.js (tested with v16) to build this project (the generated JS output only requires V8).
First, run npm install to install dependencies, including TypeScript and rollup.
Then, run npm run build. This takes the code in src/app.ts as input, and puts the rolled-up JS in dist/app.js.
Finally, run Rscript run.R to run dist/app.js in R/V8.