16
Performance
R is not a fast language. This is not an accident. R was purposely designed to make data analysis and statistics easier for you to do. It was not designed to make life easier for your computer. While R is slow compared to other programming languages, for most purposes, it’s fast enough.
The goal of this part of the book is to give you a deeper understanding of R’s performance characteristics. In this chapter, you’ll learn about some of the trade-offs that R has made, valuing flexibility over performance. The following four chapters will give you the skills to improve the speed of your code when you need to:
- In Chapter 17, you’ll learn how to systematically make your code faster. First you figure what’s slow, and then you apply ...
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