R vs. Matlab performance benchmarking | Hacker News Reader

R vs. Matlab performance benchmarking

mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk

2 pointspageman2 comments

Naturally, speed is not necessarily a key consideration. We'd all be using C if it was after all

But that isn't true - the great strength of mathematically-oriented high-level languages is that they give you all the ease/speed of development of "scripting" languages and offload the heavy number crunching to LAPACK/BLAS/whatever, which are highly tuned FORTRAN and assembly language. There's no way hacking up your own matrix multiply or FFT in C makes sense given the availability of these languages.

  Matlab does have a lot of great features like ... clean syntax

Are we talking about the same Matlab? The one where you get one function per file?

Can someone in the know add more detail, i.e., is any of this due to proprietary algorithms, or is this a question of implementation and tuning? Why is R faster in a few cases?

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