Is it possible to develop a set of functions in julia (e.g. a specialised optimization algorithm), "compile" it and then use this code from r standalone, i.e. without needing a julia installation?
In other words, is it possible to use Julia as we can already use Cpp?
Or there plans to support this kind of workflow in the nearer future?
I am aware of the Julia and JuliaCall packages, but I think they were designt for a different kind of workflow.
You can use PackageCompiler.jl to generate a shared library which you can call from R or C easily enough (instructions in their readme). The binaries are huge and often still have long start-up times, but there is ongoing, funded work on static compiling in Julia, so this will plausibly get better over the next year or so.