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Support cross-host R sessions with sess

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#1,763 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
r, typescript

Research direction

The issue mentions the new 'sess' architecture using bidirectional JSON-RPC over a stream socket. Start by examining the sess implementation in the codebase, likely in the src/ directory, to understand the current transport mechanism. Look for socket handling and connection logic. The goal is to modify sess to accept connections from a different host, possibly via TCP. Testing will involve setting up a cross-host scenario, perhaps with SSH forwarding, to verify the session attachment works.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature-request

There have been repeated requests to attach vscode-R to an R session running on a different host from the VS Code extension host, particularly in HPC environments where VS Code runs on a login node while R runs on a scheduler-allocated compute node.

Related issues include #469, #1019, #1047, #1276, #1359, #1391, #1506, and #1541.

Historically this was difficult because the session watcher depended on shared files, file watchers, and local process IDs.

With the new sess architecture, communication is now bidirectional JSON-RPC over a stream socket.
This should make cross-host sessions feasible in the future, for example through SSH socket forwarding or an additional TCP transport, without changing the higher-level session protocol.

I don't think vscode-R needs to manage SSH, Slurm, or other schedulers itself.
The useful boundary would be simply allowing sess to connect when the R process and the extension host are on different machines.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
1.2k
Forks
139
Avg merge
16h 16m
Merged PRs (30d)
11

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