[R] How to write efficient R code

[Hadley Wickham]

You may also be interested in reading the latest article on artima.com 
(http://www.artima.com/intv/abstreffi.html) where Bjarne Stroustrup (the 
creator of C++) discusses some of the benefits and costs of abstraction, 
as well as premature vs. prudent optimisation.

It is important to remember that the key to improving execution speeds 
is profiling your running code - we're not good at anticipating what 
parts of a program will be slow.  It's much better to run the program 
and see.

Hadley

Lennart.Borgman at astrazeneca.com wrote:

> I have been lurking in this list a while and searching in the archives to
> find out how one learns to write fast R code. One solution seems to be to
> write part of the code not in R but in C. However after finding a benchmark
> article (http://www.sciviews.org/other/benchmark.htm) I have been more
> interested in making the R code itself more efficient. I would like to find
> more info about this. I have tried to mail the contact person for the
> benchmark, but I have so recieved no reply.
> 
> I am not an R programmer (or statistican) so I do not know R well. I am
> looking for some advice about writing fast R code. What about the different
> data types for example? Is there some good place to start to look for more
> info about this? 
> 
> 
> Thanks for any pointers
> Lennart
>