The R Consortium and the Linux Foundation are investing in a new code-hosting platform that will help streamline the development and distribution of software packages for R, the popular statistical programming language.

Titled R-Hub, the platform will offer development, building, testing and validation services for R packages. R developers proposed the creation of R-Hub in July 2015 to serve as "the everything-builder the R community needs."

Some of the services that R-Hub will provide are already available elsewhere, notably from CRAN and R-Forge. But R-Hub will go further by offering a centralized place for developing and validating R code while remaining compatible with CRAN and R-Forge, according to the R Consortium, which is a Linux Foundation collaborative project.

"R-Hub will modernize and improve the entire process of developing and testing R packages," said Hadley Wickham, Infrastructure Steering Committee Chair, R Consortium.

Development of R-Hub will be supported by a grant that the R Consortium awarded to Gábor Csárdi, who will implement the proposed platform. This is the first of a series of $200,000 total of grants that the R Consortium's Infrastructure Steering Committee intends to award over the coming months.

The R Consortium has announced a call for proposals for additional projects that it could support through the grant program. It is accepting proposals through January 10, 2016.

"We are dedicating a large portion of R Consortium resources to help fund projects that will help sustain the technical growth of the R community," Wickham said. "We very much look forward to it."