Vectors vs scalars is a different issue than boxed/primitive types. Of course you want to be working with vectors for these kinds of problems. But the ability

Vectors vs scalars is a different issue than boxed/primitive types. Of course you want to be working with vectors for these kinds of problems. But the ability to work with vectors of primitives rather than vectors of boxed types is about enormous gains in efficiency and memory usage. This is one of the reasons that R is so slow compared to other tools.