Absolutely. But the impression I get from the article isn't that they benchmarked their solution vs R-trees or S2 and it proved quicker, rather it seems to me t

Absolutely. But the impression I get from the article isn't that they benchmarked their solution vs R-trees or S2 and it proved quicker, rather it seems to me they didn't bother trying the other approaches at all because of their perceived complexity. I might have the wrong end of the stick because the article doesn't go into enough detail to truly know either way. If they really didn't benchmark any other algorithms then talking about the performance of the language seems somewhat moot.