R ships with the reference BLAS which is 4x slower than OpenBLAS even on modestly sized problems. If you value portability over performance, I guess that's an o

R ships with the reference BLAS which is 4x slower than OpenBLAS even on modestly sized problems. If you value portability over performance, I guess that's an ok choice, but we want to make sure that Julia ships with the best open source BLAS available. If that means putting up with the occasional broken builds on Travis, I think it's worth it. OpenBLAS is just one example – R seems to have consistently chosen portability over performance for their libraries. That's a viable choice, but it's not the one we've made.