

Reactor: a project to examine the performance of the R language - hatmatrix
http://r.cs.purdue.edu/

======
nkurz
I was recently profiling some R code for a friend, and this is a useful
summary. They don't show the data on their website, but their white paper
([http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/ecoop12.pdf](http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/ecoop12.pdf))
shows the times for R vs Python vs C for some of the code on a popular
language bencmark:
[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/)

Summarizing the summary of their summary of things that probably shouldn't be
summarized:

On average across their tests, Python is 1/50th the speed of C, and R is
1/500th.

R frequently uses 100x to 1000x more heap memory than C.

R code size (number of lines ignoring comments) is usually about 1/2 that of
C, which is about the same as Python.

As a second set of data, the site for
[http://julialang.org/](http://julialang.org/) has some timing comparisons for
some similar programs. On their tests, Julia comes out about 1-1.5x slower
than of C (frequently equal), Python 3x-30x slower (usually in the middle),
and R 4x-500x slower (fairly even distribution).

