[R] Which language is faster for numerical computation?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Don't underestimate the importance of the choice of the algorithm you
use.  That often makes a huge difference.  Also, vectorization is key
in R, and when you use that you're really up there among the top
performing languages.  Here is an example from the official R wiki
illustrating my points:

  http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=tips:programming:code_optim2

My rule of thumb is:

Any piece of code can be made twice as fast.

/Henrik

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 6:06 AM, Prof. John C Nash <nashjc at uottawa.ca> wrote:
> Dirk E. has properly focussed the discussion on measurement rather than
> opinion. I'll add the issue of the human time taken to convert, and more
> importantly debug, interfaced code. That too could be measured, but we
> rarely see human hours to code/debug/test reported.
>
> Moreover, I'll mention the cat among the pigeons of Rcgmin, which I wrote to
> allow me to play with an optimization code more easily to discover where the
> algorithm might be improved. The resulting package on some problems
> outperforms C equivalents. Now the code is quite vectorized, but this has
> still been a very nice surprise. In fact, I've decided to avoid playing
> around with the interfaces if I can run things well-enough entirely in R.
>
> JN
>
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