Re: [R] Which language is faster for numerical computation?

2010-09-10 Thread Hadley Wickham
On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote: > Don't underestimate the importance of the choice of the algorithm you > use.  That often makes a huge difference.  Also, vectorization is key > in R, and when you use that you're really up there among the top > performing languages.  Her

Re: [R] Which language is faster for numerical computation?

2010-09-10 Thread Henrik Bengtsson
Don't underestimate the importance of the choice of the algorithm you use. That often makes a huge difference. Also, vectorization is key in R, and when you use that you're really up there among the top performing languages. Here is an example from the official R wiki illustrating my points:

Re: [R] Which language is faster for numerical computation?

2010-09-10 Thread Prof. John C Nash
Dirk E. has properly focussed the discussion on measurement rather than opinion. I'll add the issue of the human time taken to convert, and more importantly debug, interfaced code. That too could be measured, but we rarely see human hours to code/debug/test reported. Moreover, I'll mention the

Re: [R] Which language is faster for numerical computation?

2010-09-09 Thread Dirk Eddelbuettel
On 9 September 2010 at 13:26, Rainer M Krug wrote: | -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- | Hash: SHA1 | | On 09/09/10 12:26, Christofer Bogaso wrote: | > Dear all, R offers integration mechanism with different programming | > languages like C, C++, Fortran, .NET etc. Therefore I am curious on, | >

Re: [R] Which language is faster for numerical computation?

2010-09-09 Thread Matt Shotwell
For the compiled languages, it depends heavily on the compiler. This sort of comparison is rendered moot by the huge variety of compiler and hardware specific optimizations. My suggestion is to use C, or possibly C++ in conjunction with Rcpp, as these are most compatible with R. Also, C and C++ are

Re: [R] Which language is faster for numerical computation?

2010-09-09 Thread Rainer M Krug
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/09/10 12:26, Christofer Bogaso wrote: > Dear all, R offers integration mechanism with different programming > languages like C, C++, Fortran, .NET etc. Therefore I am curious on, > for heavy numerical computation which language is the fastest? Is

[R] Which language is faster for numerical computation?

2010-09-09 Thread Christofer Bogaso
Dear all, R offers integration mechanism with different programming languages like C, C++, Fortran, .NET etc. Therefore I am curious on, for heavy numerical computation which language is the fastest? Is there any study? I specially want to know because, if there is some study saying that C is the f