4 ms·

Maybe 3-4 years ago there was a big push to speedup R by replacing the runtime; at least 3 competing replacements were talked about pretty actively. None of the

Maybe 3-4 years ago there was a big push to speedup R by replacing the runtime; at least 3 competing replacements were talked about pretty actively. None of them achieved much mindshare. R trades runtime speed for dev speed, and we juice performance by writing slow stuff in C++ and linking Intel's MKL. The RStudio folks are also making the low-level stuff faster and more consistent through the r-lib family of packages, which are awesome. Big barriers to adoption here: not a truly drop-in replacement, R people have an aversion to Java (we've all spent hours debugging rJava; luckily most of those packages have been rewritten in C++ now), and nobody likes Oracle. I think the best-case scenario here is that progress on FastR pushes the R-Core team to improve GNU-R.

truculent 8y ago
I never fail to be amazed at all the work the RStudio et al. team do to push R towards the wonderful programming language/environment it could be, rather than what it has been.
- claytonjy 8y ago
  I'm in the same boat, and would have gladly left R years ago if not for all their efforts
- digitalzombie 8y ago
  They recently added terminal to RStudio. I'm so happy not switching between two app Iterm2 and RStudio.
  - truculent 8y ago
    Yep. The python support is starting to get pretty decent as well. I much prefer Rmarkdown for R and python (or both at the same time!) for e.g.
WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
There's also microsoft's R-Open (https://mran.microsoft.com/download https://mran.microsoft.com/download) which I've found is faster than the out of the box R since it supports better multi-threading of commands.
- claytonjy 8y ago
  IIRC most of that is because they use Intel's MKL and a better BLAS; if you like docker, using the Rocker containers uses the better BLAS, and I think adding MKL isn't too hard either.
gameswithgo 8y ago
> R trades runtime speed for dev speed This claim is made about a lot of things, Ruby, Python etc. I think the important point is it that there is no trade going on. It just that these things are all slower / less efficient than they need to be.
- claytonjy 8y ago
  Maybe that's true, but I think Julia is the first effort to prove that out in the numerical/statistical world, and while lovely the ecosystem is far behind because of how much newer it is.
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    javascript showed that dynamically typed languages can be jitted well. It is just hard, and we spread our efforts over so many languages they don't all have the resources to do it.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      SELF and Dylan were there first.
    - claytonjy 8y ago
      sure, but there's plenty of other reasons why JS isn't a contender in this interactive-data-analysis space
      - gameswithgo 8y ago
        oh for sure, but for Python/R the barrier to speed isn't any of their important productivity features (as far as I know) but just a high quality compiler/JIT If I was Lord Of Computing I wouldn't let languages out of beta until they had a high quality compiler or JIT. Turns out I am not though.
        greenshackle2 8y ago

truculent 8y ago

I never fail to be amazed at all the work the RStudio et al. team do to push R towards the wonderful programming language/environment it could be, rather than what it has been.

claytonjy 8y ago
I'm in the same boat, and would have gladly left R years ago if not for all their efforts
digitalzombie 8y ago
They recently added terminal to RStudio. I'm so happy not switching between two app Iterm2 and RStudio.
- truculent 8y ago
  Yep. The python support is starting to get pretty decent as well. I much prefer Rmarkdown for R and python (or both at the same time!) for e.g.

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago

There's also microsoft's R-Open (https://mran.microsoft.com/download https://mran.microsoft.com/download) which I've found is faster than the out of the box R since it supports better multi-threading of commands.

claytonjy 8y ago
IIRC most of that is because they use Intel's MKL and a better BLAS; if you like docker, using the Rocker containers uses the better BLAS, and I think adding MKL isn't too hard either.

gameswithgo 8y ago

> R trades runtime speed for dev speed This claim is made about a lot of things, Ruby, Python etc. I think the important point is it that there is no trade going on. It just that these things are all slower / less efficient than they need to be.

claytonjy 8y ago
Maybe that's true, but I think Julia is the first effort to prove that out in the numerical/statistical world, and while lovely the ecosystem is far behind because of how much newer it is.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  javascript showed that dynamically typed languages can be jitted well. It is just hard, and we spread our efforts over so many languages they don't all have the resources to do it.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    SELF and Dylan were there first.
  - claytonjy 8y ago
    sure, but there's plenty of other reasons why JS isn't a contender in this interactive-data-analysis space
    - gameswithgo 8y ago
      oh for sure, but for Python/R the barrier to speed isn't any of their important productivity features (as far as I know) but just a high quality compiler/JIT If I was Lord Of Computing I wouldn't let languages out of beta until they had a high quality compiler or JIT. Turns out I am not though.
      - greenshackle2 8y ago