R has certainly gained some traction in recent years, as people have added more packages. It is interpreted so I'm not sure how this will affect speed. I haven'

R has certainly gained some traction in recent years, as people have added more packages. It is interpreted so I'm not sure how this will affect speed. I haven't had a chance to use it personally so wouldn't be able to comment. I know a guy who has a dual processor Xeon machine, each with 4 cores, running MatLab. Once the code was parallelised it zipped along.