Adding a Julia engine for knitr?

[bschneidr]

The JuliaConnectoR package is currently the most stable interface to Julia from R, not only because of the TCP-based design but also because the main alternative, JuliaCall, seems to be unstable and not really actively maintained. I reached out to the developers of knitr about the idea of using JuliaConnectoR instead of JuliaCall when running Julia code. They suggested reaching out and seeing if you, the package authors, would be interested in adding a knitr engine similar to JuliaCall, so that JuliaConnectoR would be used instead.

Here's the relevant discussion thread in the knitr repo: https://github.com/yihui/knitr/issues/2295#issuecomment-1952024524

Does this seem like something you'd be interested in supporting? I think @cderv and other Posit/knitr developers might be able to help implement this if this is something you'd consider adding to the package.

The reason I reached out to the knitr team is because I recently wrote a Quarto blog post about using R+Julia and the JuliaConnectoR package. The JuliaConnectoR code worked super smoothly, but I had a really frustrating experience trying to get Julia to run in Quarto using the JuliaCall knitr engine.