[R] How does R compares for speed?

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Philippe Grosjean wrote:

> Hi,
>
> For those who are interested, I have update my R benchmark (to version
> 1.5.0) and also to Splus 6. They are available at:
> http://www.sciviews.org/other/benchmark.htm. A comparison is made between
> Matlab (5.3 & 6), R 1.5.0, Splus 6 rel 2, O-Matrix 5.1, Octave 2.1.31,
> Scilab 2.6, Rlab 2.1 and OX 3.00 under Windows 2000 pro.
>
> Overall, R is not the fastest package, but it is one of the fastest... and
> comparison with Splus is interesting! Please, note that the benchmark tests
> only a few function, and also gives no information about the "richness" or
> "usability" of the various software tested. At least, it is interesting to
> note that R is becoming more and more performant with versions: the
> benchmark applied to previous versions of R identified some lacks in
> performance, particularly in the sort() function, which now belong to the
> past. Congratulation for all who contributed (and still contribute) to make
> R one of the best statistical and "number crunching" system!!!

I couldn't find any details of how you actually programmed the systems.
For one example, there are many ways to do linear regression in R, and
most of them give a lot more output than matrix languages.  I suspect
R and S-PLUS are slow on test I-E because they do more.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


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