[R] R badly lags matlab on performance?

[hadley wickham]

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Ajay Shah <ajayshah at mayin.org> wrote:
>> As for jit and Ra, that was immediate reaction too but I found that jit does
>> not help on your example.  But I concur fully with what Ben said --- use the
>> tool that is appropriate for the task at hand.  If your task is running for
>> loops, Matlab does it faster and you have Matlab, well then you should by all
>> means use Matlab.
>
> A good chunk of statistical computation involves loops. We are all
> happy R users. I was surprised to see that we are so far from matlab
> in the crucial dimension of performance.

I would disagree: only a small amount of statistical computation
involves explicit loops at the R level.  More importantly, the time
taken for this looping is a very small fraction of the total time
spent doing statistical computation.

Hadley

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