[Rd] Announcing pqR - a faster version of R

[Radford Neal]

I have released a new, faster, version of R, which I call pqR (for
"pretty quick" R), based on R-2.15.0.  Among many other improvements,
pqR supports automatic use of multiple cores to perform numerical
computations in parallel with other numerical computations, and with
the interpretive thread.  It also implements a true reference counting
scheme to reduce the amount of unnecessary duplication of objects.
There are also substantial speed ups in general interpretive overhead,
and in particular operations.

Readers of r-devel can try out pqR by downloading a source tarball
from radfordneal.github.io/pqR (only tested on Linux/Unix so far).
The source repository is github.com/radfordneal/pqR - look in the MODS
file to see how the changes from R-2.15.0 are organized.

The R Core Team may wish to look at the list of bugs fixed in pqR, in
the NEWS file, since many of them are present in their current version
of R.

I will be making a series of posts discussing pqR at my blog, which is
at radfordneal.wordpress.com