Positron (beta)

Positron is a new data science IDE built by Posit PBC (the same company that created RStudio, with its memerbs creating and contributing to a number of prominent R libraries, such as shiny, tidyverse and tidymodels). Positron is based on VSCode and is currently in early stages of development and works with both R and Python, but requires additional steps to set everything up.

Positron IDE, running locally on a computer.

Based on their FAQ page we provide a number of observations:

• There are plans to make the IDE support a variety of programming languages, aimed at Data Science. Currently R and Python are supported.
• There is no native browser or server version of Positron available or planned, outside of Posit Workbench. This is in contrast to RStudio server, which can be easily setup to work from docker for free.
• The Posit company is committed to maintaining and updating RStudio. However, if Posit grows in popularity, there is no guarantee that in 5 or 10+ years RStudio will receive the same level of support it does now.

Positron is free to use.