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Making R run Fast - Jan Vitek

John O'Neill · 865 views · 2016-03-02 · 1:21:39

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2017–2023

Topics

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisSoftware performance & optimizationData science & statistics
Search by tags
r languagejit compilersperformancelanguage semanticsfastr

What people said

lottin · 2018-10 · Recommendation

I recommend watching this video - Making R run fast [VIDEO] It's a little disappointing, because the conclusion is that R will probably never "run fast", but very interesting nonetheless.

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StefanKarpinski · 2018-06 · Recommendation

Perhaps the best way to understand what makes Julia fast is to watch these two videos about Python and R and what makes them so hard to optimize: [LINK] [VIDEO] Take everything mentioned in these videos that make Python and R really hard to optimize and don't do those things :D

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simonbyrne · 2017-07 · Recommendation

Another talk on the difficulty of optimising R is this fantastic one by Jan Vitek: [VIDEO] Also, my favourite R trick: foo <- function() {rm(foo, envir=environment(foo))}

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Sources

Video by John O'Neill, played through YouTube.

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