I am surprised no one has mentioned the awful [garbage collector](https://stackoverflow.com/q/14580233/850781).

The R garbage collector is imperfect in the following (not so) subtle way: it does not move objects (i.e., it does not compact memory) because of the way it interacts with C libraries. (Some other languages/implementations suffer from this too, but others, despite also having to interact with C, manage to have a compacting generational GC which does not suffer from this problem).