> MATLAB uses BLAS and LAPACK under the hood. You can write reasonably fast code in MATLAB if most of your time is spent calling out to faster low level impleme

> MATLAB uses BLAS and LAPACK under the hood. You can write reasonably fast code in MATLAB if most of your time is spent calling out to faster low level implementations. Many years ago I was implementing a statistical model in R that involved a lot of matrix multiplication (the model included a non-negative matrix factorization step). Fed up with how slow it was in R, I quickly reimplemented it in MATLAB--literally copy-pasted the code and changed things like operators and function names--for an immediate 5x speedup.