linear search

[Thomas Lumley]

On Fri, 26 Mar 1999, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> Doug Bates writes:
> >... Also, the search to resolve a name is a linear search over the
> >available names.  ...
> 
> Does anyone have an idea of how series a problem this is with large packages. R
> still runs slower than Splus 3.3 for me, and I wonder how big a part of the
> problem this is?

A very limited profiling experiment about a year ago (so out of date as
well as limited) suggested that perhaps 15-30% of R's time is spent in the
linear search functions when running the survival4 test suite.

We do intend to implement hashing for name lookup fairly soon. It should
make a noticeable difference, especially with huge libraries like lme
(over 500 functions) loaded.

The relative speed of R and S-PLUS is very problem-dependent, so it's hard
to make any reliable predictions.

	-thomas


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