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> There have been efforts in the past to introduce a JIT compiler, but nothing has become mainline yet It's been included in the default install of R since ver
by bachmeier 12y ago
> There have been efforts in the past to introduce a JIT compiler, but nothing has become mainline yet
It's been included in the default install of R since version 2.14. You can compile any function you want, and in some cases you can get a speedup of several times. Sure, you're not getting the speed of C, but it's there, it works, and in the future it will lead to much larger speedups.
Some info and timings are here: http://www.rinfinance.com/agenda/2014/talk/LukeTierney.pdf http://www.rinfinance.com/agenda/2014/talk/LukeTierney.pdf
The experimental version of the compiler can achieve speedups in the neighborhood of 20x.
- grayclhn 12y agoAre you sure you're referring to JIT as opposed to byte-compilation?
- tenfingers 12y agoI have R 3.1.x and I never noticed (it's in "compiler"). It's off by default... pretty sad.
- jghn 12y agoIt can, but it often doesn't, at least not a year or so ago (perhaps it got much better). I've seen the examples with great speedups but every time I've tried it on real code I never saw anything. You're much better off just using Rcpp for those sorts of cases.
- lottin 12y agoWell, it's true, it is included in the default install. After unsuccessfully trying to locate the elusive 'compiler' package at CRAN, I came to the conclusion that the R compiler was an urban legend. Now I realise it was already installed all along from the start and all I had to do is 'library(compiler)'. Silly me.
- bachmeier 12y ago> Silly me. Not really. That's an example of one R's rough edges. I did the same thing.