

R vs. Matlab performance benchmarking - pageman
http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/dave/rmbenchmark.php

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gaius
_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.

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mgreenbe

      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?

