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Making R run Fast - Jan Vitek

John O'Neill · talk · Watch on YouTube

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisSoftware performance & optimizationData science & statistics

What it is

Jan Vitek of Northeastern University gives a meetup talk on the challenges of making the R language run fast. He explains what in R's semantics makes it hard to optimize and to build a JIT compiler for.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN points to it as the best explanation of why R is so hard to optimize, often paired with talks on Python and used to explain what makes Julia fast.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2017, last 2023

What HN commenters said

  1. “Another talk on the difficulty of optimising R is this fantastic one by Jan Vitek”

    Why R is hard to optimize.

    simonbyrne, 2017-07 · Recommendation · in “Back to the Future: Lisp as a Base for a Statistical Computing System [pdf]”

  2. “Perhaps the best way to understand what makes Julia fast is to watch these two videos about Python and R”

    What makes R and Python hard to optimize.

    StefanKarpinski, 2018-06 · Recommendation · in “My favorite things that are coming with Julia 1.0”

  3. “I recommend watching this video - Making R run fast”

    Why R will probably never run fast.

    lottin, 2018-10 · Recommendation · in “Faster R with FastR”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: r language, jit compilers, performance, language semantics, fastr

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